Background: A lack of student 'buy-in' and engagement are often major obstacles in academic literacy courses. To create a dialogic learning environment which encourages student investment and challenges traditional student-lecturer hierarchies of power, the curriculum of a first-year academic literacy course at a South African university was…

Responding to change is a critical workforce competency and an essential skill for effective leadership and management along with abilities to work in a group, problem solve, and demonstrate critical thinking capabilities. In this experiential exercise, students collaborate in groups, think critically, and respond to customer demands in a…

The technology in the K-12 classroom has changed from being a tool that educators can utilize on an as needed basis, to a classroom necessity. The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore K-12 technology directors experiences in the decision-making process of integrating technology in a K-12 education system at a district level…

Problem-solving and critical thinking are considered important skills to be developed by students, and are supported by the development of Computational Thinking (CT) skills. This study investigated the collaborative development of CT skills in sixth grade students via a six week LEGO robotics program. This robotics program focused on the…

Collaborative group assignments in undergraduate education are important for promoting skill development and preparation for the workplace; however, they are subject to the challenges associated with group dynamics. This research sought to determine the effectiveness of a Group Work Contract to facilitate professional behaviours and positive…

The present study aims to incorporate a group leadership promotion approach into collaborative learning tasks in the hope of developing students' creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we recruited 59 cross-professional students from a university in northern Taiwan, and…

Focusing on a section of the Teaching International Students (TIS) project this article captures student and mentor perspectives within a Project-Based Professional Experience (PBPE) in the context of a large research-intensive university in Sydney, Australia. Animations co-produced with students were part of a Work Integrated Learning (WIL)…

This article reports the results of a one-year longitudinal study examining a teaching intervention designed to enhance students' learning of critical thinking in Hong Kong. Seventy participating students (age 16-18) learned how to make reasoned arguments through a series of collaborative activities, including critical-thinking modelling tasks and…

In this article, the author outlines a variety of ways of defining, making explicit, and supporting effective team-based projects through the basic tenets of Lean Six Sigma and the use of Web-based technologies. A combination of Lean Six Sigma and a handful of project management technologies not only help in fostering the communication central to…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 14th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2017), 18-20 October 2017, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) and endorsed by the Japanese Society for Information and Systems in…

This book is designed to provide individuals with practical assistance in introducing and using critical reflection strategies. It is intended for workshop facilitators whose aim is to assist committees, organizations, and various groups in solving problems. The book explains procedures for Critical Reflection Strategies using Teams (CReST), a…

Orienteering is an outdoor pursuit in which participants try to locate a series of different control points, using only a map and compass (Laubach, 1998). It is a life-long skill that can be taught to all ages in both a natural and urban setting. Adventure education is an approach to teaching where an individual is placed in an unfamiliar…

Synectics is a method of creative problem solving through the use of metaphor and apparent irrelevancy developed by William J. J. Gordon. The process involves rational knowledge of the problem to be solved, irrational improvisations that lead to fertile associations creating new approaches to the problem, and euphoric state that is essential in…

Describes a theoretical framework of distributed representations to explore the representational properties in group problem solving. The experiment shows that different distributed representations across two individuals produced dramatically different group problem-solving behaviors; and two minds could be better than one mind, depending on how…

To investigate the influence of group settings on the receiver's perception of an inducement to rhetorical transactions, 45 undergraduates in a basic speech communication course were asked to rank from most important to least important a group of items that might help survivors of an arctic plane crash. After completing individual rankings,…