Introductory sociolinguistics courses at university can be challenging, especially for students at the very beginning of their tertiary studies. Difficulties may arise due to students not having any prior exposure to the discipline's content or methodologies, which is likely to be a result of these aspects not generally being taught in high…

Quantitative reasoning and interdisciplinary skills are central to real-world environmental problem solving. Enhancing those skills for students in environmental programs will help them succeed as future environmental professionals. This paper describes an approach that uses an applied geophysical imaging course to enhance quantitative reasoning…

Drawing on four years of anecdotal data and student feedback on course evaluations, this paper provides a retrospective account of the author's experience with teacher candidates in an elementary writing instruction course as first-time authors of children's books, in particular focusing on a writing workshop approach as an effective pedagogical…

Increasingly, many of our higher education teaching staff hail from diverse backgrounds with cultures that are often dissimilar to the world of academia. Drawn to education as a second career, or courted from industry for real world verisimilitude, their experience and external sector knowledge can be invaluable to an institution, but of little…

Although expectations for graduate students' writing abilities are high, their actual writing skills are often subpar (Cuthbert & Spark, 2008; Singleton-Jackson, Lumsden, & Newson, 2009), even though academic writing is considered integral to graduate education and necessary for career preparedness (e.g., Mullen, 2006; Stevens, 2005).…

Large first year survey units pose unique challenges to both teachers and learners. Survey units are designed to deliver non-disciplinary specific knowledge about a given subject to a wide audience of learners. However, first year students in these units often find that they are unable to identify the architecture of such units, and are hence…

This paper examines the challenge of teaching statistical research methods in three master's degree programs at a private university based in Washington, DC. We, as three professors teaching at this university, discuss the way we employ innovative approaches to deal with this challenge. We ground our discussion within the theoretical framework of…

Though the concept of noticing has been extensively addressed in the SLA literature, few studies suggest promoting noticing through collaborative feedback tasks (CFTs) in an EFL college writing classroom. To fill this gap, this paper attempts to provide a framework for promoting noticing through CFTs using three sequenced and interrelated CFTs:…

This article describes the process of faculty-led development of a student evaluation of teaching instrument at Centurion School of Rural Enterprise Management, a management institute in India. The instrument was to focus on teacher behaviors that students get an opportunity to observe. Teachers and students jointly contributed a number of…

This paper seeks to re-conceptualize the research supervision relationship. The literature has tended to view doctoral study in four ways: (a) as an exercise in self-management, (b) as a research experience, (c) as training for research, or (d) as an instance of student-centred learning. Although each of these approaches has merit, they also…

The purpose of this article is to present a model of academic motivation that can be used by instructors to design courses that will engage students in learning. The model, based on research and theory, consists of five components that an instructor should consider when designing instruction: (1) empowerment, (2) usefulness, (3) success, (4)…

While there are recognized and demonstrated benefits of service learning for student outcomes, challenges professors may face using such approach for competency-based teaching have seldom been discussed. This paper describes the integration of service-learning pedagogy in teaching a project-based course on program planning to new Masters of Public…

The performing arts studio is a highly complex learning setting, and assessing student outcomes relative to reliable and valid standards has presented challenges to this teaching and learning method. Building from the general international higher education literature, this article illustrates details, processes, and solutions, drawing on…

This article describes a pilot project carried out at City University London, Department of Language and Communication Science, where adult service users with learning disabilities trained first-year speech and language therapy students. The training involved presentations by the service users on their involvement in interviewing support staff,…

Challenged by some of the inherent difficulties in teaching qualitative data analysis, three instructors created an interactive digital learning object entitled "Sleuthing the Layered Text: Investigating Coding." In this paper we assess the effectiveness of that learning object as a tool for teaching qualitative coding. On the face of it, learning…