For the communication theory course to be successful, instructors must tap into their students' lives and create a sense of how communication theory is not only relevant to their needs, interests, or goals, but also practical when applied to their social, personal, and organizational relationships. One way in which instructors can create a sense…

Amongst a range of changes that have taken place within tertiary education, perhaps the most revolutionary has been a shift to student-centred approaches focused on lifelong learning. Accompanying this approach to holistic higher education (HE) has been a growing interest in, and understanding of, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).…

This microgenetic case study explores how an undergraduate student (Nolan) in a second-year seminar mastered an argument weighing scheme and used it to organize his writing. The students in this seminar completed argumentation vee diagrams (AVDs) prior to discussing controversial issues. Students also completed preessays and postessays on a…

Effectively addressing both cognitive and affective dimensions of learning is one of the greatest obstacles to teaching race and racial justice in higher education. In this article, we first explore the need to integrate attention to cognitive and affective development, along with evidence-based strategies for doing so. We then provide a case…

Increasing empathy toward others is an unspoken goal of many sociology courses, but rarely do instructors measure changes in empathy throughout a semester. To address this gap in the literature, I use a combination of quantitative and qualitative data gathered before and after students from five sociology classes participated in a simulation on…

Output orientation in the realm of education has become a requirement for higher education that is now slowly starting to be manifested in its curricula. This raises the question: what competences students are supposed to develop in the course of their studies and how these competences can be developed. In a first step, this article will therefor…

Management education research has provided educators with new instructional tools to improve course design and update the methods used in the classroom. In an effort to provide the typical undergraduate management student with the best possible learning experience and outcomes, it is important to recognize how and why these new activities benefit…

This article describes a study of teaching and learning in the first--or "foundation"--year of art college. As a multiple embedded case study informed by systems theory, the following cases are described: art colleges, foundation programs, professors, and students. The data were collected through surveys, interviews, classroom…

This reflective essay tells the story of the transition of a Hollywood director to the professoriate. Jack Sholder's name may be familiar to those who are film buffs. As a filmmaker in Hollywood, he directed such films as "Alone in the Dark," "Nightmare on Elm Street 2," and "The Hidden." In addition, he won an Emmy…

As the number of international faculty members teaching in U.S. colleges steadily increases, greater attention needs to be given to how 21st-century college classrooms can be shaped by these multilingual teachers' linguistic and sociocultural "funds of knowledge" (Moll, 1990) and how their backgrounds can help native-speaking students to…

This study samples first year undergraduates from two programmes at a Hong Kong University (N = 66). One programme uses an entirely problem-based approach to learning and teaching, whilst the other uses more traditional methods. Using the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI) as a measure of student perceptions of their thinking, or…

In Australia, academic workloads are increasing, and university funding is decreasing. Academics and university managers are engaging in risk adverse behavior and tending to focus on customer satisfaction and student retention, potentially at the expense of academic standards. Conventional approaches to pedagogy minimize adverse student feedback,…

We discuss Konstantinos Alexakos, Jayson Jones and Victor Rodriguez's hermeneutic study of formation and function of kinship-like relationships among inner city male students of color in a college physics classroom. From our Critical Complexity Science framework we first discuss the reading "erlebnisse" of students laughing at and with each other…

Studying a foreign language at university level is a multifaceted project entailing constant identity formation as a foreign language user--and simultaneously as a plurilingual subject. As far as the second language (L2) learner is concerned, the language learning process can be seen as a construction of a new "third place" between the…

This study examined students' development of reasoning about quantitative bivariate data during a one-semester university-level introductory statistics course. There were three research questions of interest: (1) What is the nature, or pattern of change in students' development in reasoning throughout the course?; (2) Is the sequencing of…