Misconceptions among students studying physics have been widely reported in the research literature. Many teachers are not acquainted with this literature. Moreover, many of them claim that only weak students have misconceptions. This paper reports on an online activity focusing on misconceptions of students regarding Newton's 3rd Law, that is…

End-of-course examinations are only as good as the assumptions used in designing them. What is a course's "essential" content? And what does it mean to master it? The end-of-course examinations developed by ACT are derived from assumptions that offer unique and challenging answers to these questions. This brief explains the process used to develop…

This article describes the successful use of videoconferencing in a sociology capstone course as a way to introduce students to eminent scholars and authors across the country. The author begins by discussing the institutional context, and how videoconferencing fits with the departmental capstone philosophy and with her course goals. This is…

Beyond Crossroads states that mathematics faculty should (a) select technology that is accessible to students enrolled in their distance learning mathematics course, (b) advise students on the expectations of their distance learning mathematics course and orient them to the distance learning environment of their course, (c) provide students with…

This article describes the development and assessment of a graduate level online art therapy class. An introduction briefly defines art therapy and the need for distance learning in this field. The challenges inherent in teaching art therapy online, including working with art media and developing appropriate interpersonal skills and group…

This paper describes the results of a project to develop a graduate-level business course in Investment and Portfolio Management for use in a Master of Business Administration degree program at Warner Southern College (Florida). The development of the course had three phases: (1) learning outcomes were derived from a literature review on…

"Active Learning" refers to activities that help students connect new academic subjects with previous knowledge and experiences. This paper is an outline of a senior seminar on making connections between psychology and the broader lives of students. It is assumed that, for many undergraduate students, basic understandings of human nature…

In overcoming the physical limitations of a single campus, distance education promises to diversify the student population, exposing students to a wider array of experiences and backgrounds. This paper reports how adequately distance education technology fulfilled that promise in a joint seminar in American politics that included students at the…

At the end of the fifth year of a successful, ever expanding freshman seminar program, students in selected sections of the course, who were also enrolled in developmental reading/writing, were asked to evaluate the worthiness of the goals in terms of their own freshman year experience. The fifth year was a new pilot year for the program. Some…

This paper describes the basic principles and objectives of an educational approach based on "values confrontation" and evaluates its impact on student values, feelings, and behavior. After stressing the importance of forming a modern pedagogy concerned with developing rational thinking and deeper personal and social awareness, the paper…

Teacher educators from the preservice programs in the Teacher Education and Learning to Teach Study were interviewed about the purposes of their methods courses, using an interview schedule constructed around individual course syllabi. The respondents seem to have complex, hazy, and perhaps unconscious purposes for these courses. Many of the…

This course text outlines the objectives and content for a professional continuing education course on clinical medical librarianship. Following an introduction to the course, the history of clinical librarianship and several programs are described. The third section offers guidelines for setting goals and objectives for a clinical librarian…

In order to help science students communicate more effectively with people outside their field, a two-semester technical writing course was developed with an emphasis on thinking rather than on blind adherence to the rules and forms of technical writing. The initial test group was composed of freshman science majors with exceptional writing…

The taxonomy of the functions of dental x-ray technologists presented in this report resulted from a dental radiography curriculum development project undertaken at Middlesex County College (MCC) in 1981. After an introductory section citing arguments for creating taxonomies of objectives, the report explains the impetus for the curriculum…

Writing across the curriculum involves helping students to learn how to learn by using appropriate parts of the writing process, to understand that certain standards are important if they are to be considered educated, and to ascertain that writing and learning involve similar procedures and methods. At Sinclair Community College, a writing across…