As one component of a program improvement grant provided by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEPs), the authors' teacher preparation program (TPP) underwent substantial program redesign. In this article, the authors provide a detailed overview of the process they undertook to revamp their program based on the fundamental question,…

Despite the considerable attention paid to the need to increase the information literacy of high school students in preparation for the transition to college, poor research skills still seem to be the norm. To gain insight into the problem, library instruction environments of nineteen high schools were explored. The schools were selected based on…

College readiness has several dimensions, but of particular import is readiness to produce scholarly work that meets the expectations of college instructors. Differences from high school and college are well documented in the literature, and this study adds to that body of work by delineating the characteristics of first-year college assignments…

The purpose of this case study was to examine a beginning elementary teacher's development of identity for science teaching from her first year at university, her field experience, and through her first year of teaching. Several kinds of data were collected over a period of 5 years through different sources: interviews, journal entries,…

Students appear to have an almost insatiable appetite for receiving feedback and the scholarly literature has acknowledged its central importance for learning. And yet there is no widely accepted definition of feedback, most definitions reflecting the perspective of the teacher rather than student. When staff at the University of New South Wales…

Nowadays the growth of technology influences the changes in group collaboration's process either for the professional or for the students. The requirement of interaction in group collaboration while doing task forces the students to schedule their meeting in order to finish the task given. So the technology starts to influence the process of…

This article examines how to prepare professional social workers for real-world nonprofit leadership roles. A pilot course assignment that incorporates a quasi-organization fieldwork simulation developed by the author is described. Development and application of critical thinking skills are reviewed, the course objective is explained, and methods…

For decades, group work scholars have described a discrepancy between student preparation for group work practice and opportunities to work with groups in the field practicum and professional practice. Educators in related disciplines such as counseling and psychology have expressed similar concerns. This article reports findings of a study of MSW…

The challenge of teaching programming in higher education is complicated by problems associated with large class teaching, a prevalent situation in many developing countries. This paper reports on an investigation into the use of a blended learning approach to teaching and learning of programming in a class of more than 200 students. A course and…

The aim of this study is to evaluate a teaching strategy designed to teach first-year undergraduate life sciences students at a research university how to learn to read authentic research articles. Our approach--based on the work done in the field of genre analysis and argumentation theory--means that we teach students to read research articles by…

The central dogma of molecular biology, a model that has remained intact for decades, describes the transfer of genetic information from DNA to protein though an RNA intermediate. While recent work has illustrated many exceptions to the central dogma, it is still a common model used to describe and study the relationship between genes and protein…

This interview was recorded in November 2012 in Jonathan Z. Smith's Hyde Park graystone. Professor Smith offers insights into how he thinks about his classroom teaching and his students' learning through descriptions of various assignments and classroom activities he has developed over more than forty years of teaching. The discussion…

Economics appears to be lagging behind other fields in the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. Twitter is an online microblogging utility, permitting posts of up to 140 characters called tweets. The utility is rapidly making its way into secondary and post-secondary classrooms as a complement to traditional instruction and an active…

With the spread of the Internet, students now have greater opportunities to use Japanese outside of the classroom. For example, they can interact with other Japanese speakers through instant messaging or social networking, or utilize online dictionaries and translation tools to decipher websites in ways that would be impossible with traditional…

Peer grading affords a scalable and sustainable way of providing assessment and feedback to a massive student population, and has been used in massive open online courses (MOOCs) on the Coursera platform. However, currently there is little empirical evidence to support the credentials of peer grading as a learning assessment method in the MOOC…