The methodological characteristics of teaching in primary and secondary education make it necessary to revise the pedagogical and instructive lines with which to introduce the new Information and Communication Technologies into the school context. The construction of Web pages that can be used to improve student learning is, therefore, fundamental…

Teacher education programs have been slow in responding to the increasing diversity in education systems and tertiary institutions. This article focuses on the development of teacher education programs for immigrant teachers, drawing on interview and other data from a study of 110 teachers in programs at the Faculty of Education, University of…

Greece has so far seen the introduction of computers into its schools on only a limited scale. Nevertheless, technological reforms are under way to integrate information and communication technology into education at all levels. This research project has studied the views of early childhood teachers on the prospect of computer use or information…

The transition from generic mentoring to specific mentoring practices can provide a stronger focus for developing preservice primary teachers (mentees) in subject-specific areas. Constructivist theory and a five-factor model towards specific subject mentoring are proposed as ways to develop mentees' teaching practices. Firstly, constructivist…

The process of developing competencies by students in a school-based initial teacher education program was analyzed for a whole currently available population of 26 in-service students preparing to become educational assistants using: (1) a Kolb-type questionnaire on learning style; (2) a storyline instrument graphically showing competence grows…

This article explores three aspects regarding the supporting of teaching and learning through ICT (information and communication technology). First, the use and value of storyboarding as a preferable technique prior to the creation of a pupil-authored CD-ROM by children aged 9 and 14. Second, responses to the innovation by practicing teachers.…

Several years of experience in training lecturers for developing and tutoring project-based learning (PBL) courses have resulted in a 'practise as you preach' based and flexible training programme. This programme was successfully incorporated in the teacher training programmes of the University of Twente and other universities and polytechnics in…

Increasingly, professional university programmes seek to develop graduates' generic skills and capabilities and their capacity to transfer skills to new situations. Professionally-oriented study should demonstrate not only academic rigour, but also genuine relevance and value to the profession. In disciplines such as science and engineering this…

Active learning is an educational paradigm that has been reinvented and methodologically underpinned many times in order to intensify learning in various forms. This paper presents a complex approach to active learning in a design-centred academic course with international participation. Research and design were considered as vehicles of active…

This paper presents three evaluated case studies of the use of design activities in the early years of undergraduate engineering courses. Analyses of academic performance in these activities and in a separate test of understanding were correlated with student perceptions of the activities and with measures of learning style. General student…

This paper is a case study on the use of active learning techniques in an upper-level engineering course at the Helsinki University of Technology. The paper describes how these techniques were introduced and successfully used within the Finnish university classroom. The cultural subtext is explored and attention is given to teaching techniques…

The objective in this paper is the implementation of the highly structured seven-step problem-based learning (PBL) procedure as part of the learning process in a human-computer interaction (HCI) design course at the Technical University of Denmark, taking into account the common learning processes in PBL and the interaction design process. These…

Since the inception in 1987 of European funding programmes the number of students and the range of countries annually involved in international exchange have increased dramatically. In order to comply with this international development, the European Project Semester (EPS) was started in 1995. Since then, more and more students, also from…

The reasons to introduce formats of active learning in engineering (ALE) such as project work, problem-based learning, use of cases, etc. are mostly based on practical experience, and sometimes from applied research on teaching and learning. Such research shows that students learn more and different abilities than in traditional formats of…

In 2001 a large-scale project, the "Breakthrough project", to develop teaching and learning was started at Lund Institute of Technology (LTH), Lund University, Sweden. The project has had a duration of 3 years and the aims of the project were to change the paradigm from teaching to learning and implement a sense of scholarship of teaching in the…