Faculty Area: Humanities and Social Sciences

Improving reading skills in the middle school science classroom

Reading in content areas such as science requires that students read and understand expository texts. Expository texts are characterized by dense factual information, multisyllabic technical vocabulary, complex and interconnected sentences,…

Undergraduate discipline-specific writing: Expectations, demands, & development

This study examines the expectations and linguistic demands of discipline specific college writing, and the writing development of 87 students majoring in business administration, computer science, and information systems at…

Transnational labor migration in Qatar: An empirical sociological analysis

This project seeks to significantly advance Qatar’s understanding of its large foreign workforce. To date, none of the GCC countries have successfully engaged in a quantitatively grounded analysis of foreign…

Assessing English language placement tests for use in Qatari post-secondary institutions

This project will result in the construction of two electronic corpora of Qatari English: the first comprised of texts produced by Qatari students in academic contexts; the other, texts produced…

Understanding complex physiological problems in medical education

Humans have limited capacities in understanding complex problems with at least one variable developing over time. For instance, adult participants perform poorly in predicting exponential growth (e.g., Wagenaar & Sagaria,…

Images of Muslim women in translated Mideast media sources: A content and discourse analysis

Our project is designed to enhance “East/West” understanding by considering representations of Muslim women in Muslim media. Content analysis research in the west shows that western media images of Muslims…

Immigrant workers in Qatar: Documenting their history and current situation

The proposed research project explores the history and current situation of low-skilled immigrant workers in Qatar through an analysis of news media and interviews with government officials and immigrant workers.…

The state of migrant labor in Qatar: The workers perspectives

The proposed research project aims at investigating the current situation of low-skilled immigrant workers in Qatar through an extensive survey and interviews with immigrant workers. More specifically, the purpose of…

Emerging communities: The case of Hispanics in Qatar

The proposed research project aims at examining the profile of the Hispanic community in Qatar through a survey and interviews. These data will be useful for a better demographic understanding…