Teaching students to become critical consumers of interviews, which often serve as influential sources for learning and interpreting world events, is important in today's information-rich world. This paper outlines an approach to teaching in-depth interviewing in which students examine excerpts from interviews (e.g., archival collections, oral…

This research explores the perception and experiences of 15 Burmese international students temporarily studying at two international colleges in suburban Bangkok, Thailand and compares their impressions of and reaction to history with 10 Thai students studying at the same international colleges. This ethnographic exploration of Burmese…

The purpose of this pilot was to examine the effectiveness of the practice of providing opportunities for undergraduate elementary education teacher candidates to explore the campus library curriculum center as a group regularly during class time. During their visits, teacher candidates were guided in selecting and analyzing children's literature…

Research on mechanistic thinking in organic chemistry has shown that students attribute little meaning to the electron-pushing (i.e., curved arrow) formalism. At the University of Ottawa, a new curriculum has been developed in which students are taught the electron-pushing formalism prior to instruction on specific reactions--this formalism is…

Proving that a given set is indeed a subgroup, one needs to show that it is non-empty, and closed under operation and inverses. This study focuses on the first condition, analysing students' responses to this task. Results suggest that there are three distinct problematic responses: the total absence of proving this condition, the problematic…

As part of an ongoing project to examine student learning in upper-division courses in thermal and statistical physics, we have examined student reasoning about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. We have examined reasoning in terms of heat transfer, entropy maximization, and statistical treatments of multiplicity and probability. In…

A 1 credit hour First-Year Engineering Course which provides background to students on the engineering disciplinary options available to them was redesigned to help inform the selection of their engineering major for future study. Initially, course administration was a large lecture class but was transformed into smaller classes that were…

In this report we examine students' perceptions of the implementation of carefully designed curriculum materials (called modules) in linear algebra courses at three different universities. The curricular materials were produced collaboratively by STEM and mathematics education faculty as members of a professional learning community (PLC) over…

Since Schön's influential work on reflective practice, reflection has been prioritised in teacher education programmes internationally. The research described in this paper examined the development of postgraduate student teachers' reflective processes in their first school placement. Twenty-five students were asked to write an account of their…

The computer-based "Graduate Record Examinations"® ("GRE"®) revised General Test includes interactive item types and testing environment tools (e.g., test navigation, on-screen calculator, and help). How well do test takers understand these innovations? If test takers do not understand the new item types, these innovations may…

Excellence in academic performance at the graduate level requires good command of writing skills. Teachers' written feedback can help students to develop their writing skills. However, several personal and contextual factors may influence feedback processes and its utilization by students. Therefore, understanding these factors is essential to…

One challenge in science education assessment is that students often focus on surface features of questions rather than the underlying scientific principles. We investigated how student written responses to constructed-response questions about photosynthesis vary based on two surface features of the question: the species of plant and the order of…

This autoethnographic study provides a critical analysis of the implementation of ideas and theories derived from Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (1970) and "Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (1994) in a social justice oriented classroom; in particular, themes of critical thinking,…

This paper describes a lecturer's approach to teaching Bayesian statistics to students who were only exposed to the classical paradigm. The study shows how the lecturer extended himself by making use of ventriloquist dolls to grab hold of students' attention and embed important ideas in revealing the differences between the Bayesian and classical…

Social work students are witness to a variety of challenges from course content through scenarios, videos, role-plays, and field practice. Students may be vulnerable to experiencing vicarious traumatization from this exposure. Some students, however, may have personal histories of trauma and may therefore experience posttraumatic stress reactions…