A first year non-majors biology course, with an enrollment of around 440 students, has been redesigned from a course of traditional content and teaching style to one that emphasizes biological concepts in current global issues and incorporates active learning strategies. We were informed by the education literature incorporating many aspects of…

Student development has connections to important academic purposes in higher education (King, Baxter Magolda, Barber, Kendall Brown & Lindsay, 2009). In particular, a growing body of work on self-authorship, a social-constructive theory of development, has demonstrated relevance to the purposes of higher education (Baxter Magolda, 2001; King…

This paper reports the qualitative findings of a mixed methods research study conducted at three Canadian post-secondary institutions. Called the Meaningful E-learning or MEL project, the study was an exploration of the teaching and learning experiences of faculty and students as well as their perceptions of the benefits and challenges of…

There have been calls in the literature for reforms to assessment to enhance student learning (Shepard, 2000). In many instances, this refers to the need to move from traditional assessment procedures that are characterized as content-heavy, summative, and norm-referenced approaches to more constructivist and student-centred approaches, often…

This paper defines and operationalizes definitions of good teaching, scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning in order to measure characteristics of these definitions amongst undergraduate instructors at McMaster University. A total of 2496 instructors, including all part-time instructors, were surveyed in 2007. A total of…

The rise of the research intensive university has led some critics to argue that teaching has been discounted in favour of research, and thus the academy has "failed...their undergraduate populations" (Boyer Commission, 1998, p .5). This paper examines instructor perceptions of inquiry at an institution with a significant history of providing…