The past decade has evidenced significant dialogue on faith-based campuses about the persistent gap between the increasing ethnic diversity of the student population and that of the faculty. While campus administrators and leaders acknowledge the need to address this concern through faculty development, there is a disturbing lack of successful…

Undergraduate biology lab courses have long been criticized for engaging students in "cookbook" experiences in which students follow a given protocol to collect data that help answer a predetermined question. Recent reform documents in biology education have suggested that students should engage in lab courses that provide more authentic…

This article develops the familiar metaphor of teaching as performance towards a definition of "teaching as performative act," where words and actions aim to effect cognitive, affective, and behavioral changes in learners. To what extent, however, are the consequences of pedagogical actions commensurate with their intended effects? Can a science…

Nine food science and technology (FST) subjects were assessed for alignment between the learning outcomes and assessment using revised Bloom's taxonomy (RBT) of cognitive knowledge. Conjoint analysis was used to estimate the utilities of the levels of cognitive, knowledge, and the attribute importance (cognitive process and knowledge dimension)…

Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989) described cognition as "situated"--"a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used" (p. 32)--and outlined the "cognitive apprenticeship" approach to teach "what" something is, as well as "how" knowledge can be used in order to help children create their own understanding. Similar…

The main goal of the new instructional design model is to organize long term and full learning activities. The new model is based on the theoretical foundation of behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism. During teaching and learning activities, learners are active and use cognitive, constructivist, or behaviorist learning to construct new…

To address the need to better prepare teachers to enact science education reforms, the National Science Foundation has supported a Research Experience for Teachers (RET's) format for teacher professional development. In these experiences, teachers work closely with practicing scientists to engage in authentic scientific inquiry. Although…

Teacher observation is regarded as an essential procedure in the teacher training process. However, the vast majority of observation experiences have a top-down approach, as they are usually established by experts such as university teaching staff or school inspectors working for the administration. With a bottom-up approach in mind, this paper…

Teacher education needs to engage teacher candidates in developing cross-cultural competence so that they may be able to transmit global learning to their future students. This study theorizes cross-cultural competence (CCC) from the perspectives of multicultural and global education. During a four-year project at a mid-western US university,…

This article examines the merits of WebQuests in facilitating students' in-depth understanding of science concepts using the four principles of learning gathered from the National Research Council reports "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School" (1999) and the "How Students Learn: Science in the Classroom" (2005) as an analytic…

Intensive Interaction is an empirically researched approach to developing fundamental communication and sociability for people with severe and profound learning disabilities and/or autism. However, it is the author's contention that certain aspects of Intensive Interaction are not universally conceptualised in a uniform manner, and that there are…

Students enrolled in a college success course were assigned to (a) a cognitive intervention using the Career Thoughts Inventory (CTI) workbook (Sampson, Peterson, Lenz, Reardon, & Saunders, 1996b), (b) an occupational research project involving an oral report, and (c) a control condition. The workbook condition had a significant effect on the…

This paper reports on a study that explored the use of cognitively challenging tasks with low-attaining mathematics students and in particular, their teachers' attempts at scaffolding. A major finding was that responding appropriately to scaffolding opportunities was challenging for the teachers. In this paper two main factors are discussed which…

Under what conditions are graduate students most likely to learn? How do we, as teachers, best create those conditions? The answer to these questions was the focus of this study whereby 91 masters' students identified learning tasks that were most and least engaging. A model utilizing affective, behavioral and cognitive attributes was developed to…

Introductory biology courses are widely criticized for overemphasizing details and rote memorization of facts. Data to support such claims, however, are surprisingly scarce. We sought to determine whether this claim was evidence-based. To do so we quantified the cognitive level of learning targeted by faculty in introductory-level biology courses.…