Behind every educational concept an opposing notion is waiting for recognition. Despite their avowed objectives, however, academic debates do not always encourage the discussion of opposing views. A review of sessions at the December 2011 Online Educa Conference illustrates that point and others about academic meetings. Opposing viewpoints may be…

Previously, the Sherborne Developmental Movement (SDM) has been found to contribute to the development of emotional competencies in higher education. This study presents and evaluates a teaching model based on SDM for the development of emotional competencies in teacher education. The study examined the contributions of this model to the increase…

The present study examined the effectiveness of mechanical and meaningful production of output on the learning of English relative clauses by Iranian EFL learners. The study involved two groups of learners (N = 36) who completed a pre-test, three activities and a post-test over an 8-week period. The collaborative dialogue of the participants was…

In this column, readers are asked to reconsider several traditional instructional strategies, in particular predicting and picture walks, and the role these practices play in the elementary reading curriculum. In addition, what happens after a book has been read must be reconsidered in light of the activities in which life long readers engage. To…

The relationship between primary teachers' subject knowledge and their approaches to teaching is an ongoing concern. This study reviews the relationship between prospective teachers' subject knowledge in the topic of area and their approaches to teaching that topic. The research presents case studies of four primary prospective teachers on a…

This study is concerned with an exploration of the politics of language with predominately white pre-service teachers through a linguistic activity. It is a continuous, joint effort of three teacher educators working at two universities. Different pedagogical emphases and data collection methods are used at these two universities to investigate…

Most educators who work with gifted students acknowledge the importance of creativity and have found various ways to include it as part of the gifted education curriculum. In many cases, however, developing creativity is still viewed as something separate from academic learning. Students with undemonstrated creative potential often are excluded…

This article describes a fun activity that can be used to help students make links between statistical analyses and their real-world implications. Although an illustrative example is provided using analysis of variance, the activity may be adapted for use with other statistical techniques.

This article describes a simple, inexpensive, easy to conduct gel-electrophoresis activity using food dyes. It is an alternative to the more expensive counterparts which require agarose gel, DNA samples, purchased chamber and Tris-borate-EDTA buffer. We suggest some learning activities for senior biology students along with comments on several…

Describing the progression of insects that arrive at a cadaver can be a useful and exciting tool for teaching students about complex concepts such as ecological succession.

The Y chromosome is of great interest to students and can be used to teach about many important biological concepts in addition to sex determination. This paper discusses mutation, recombination, mammalian sex determination, sex determination in general, and the evolution of sex determination in mammals. It includes a student activity that…

Employers in the 21st century seek graduates with a demonstrated ability to be independent, self-managing, lifelong learners. In this paper the authors explore student responses to a tutorial activity designed to promote lifelong learning skills. The activity is framed around situated learning theory, and capitalises on the affordances of video…

In October 2010, WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) won an i3 "Validation" grant to scale up and validate the Reading Apprenticeship (RA) model in three core secondary content area classes: U.S. history, biology, and English language arts. SLI's proposal stated two goals. Goal 1: To transform academic literacy teaching and…

Application Quests are case-based learning activities that emphasize issues in professional practice and are given as part of the classroom learning process. This qualitative investigation examined students' views regarding the perceived impacts that Application Quests had on their learning. A phenomenological analysis of written assignments from…

Subtraction has two meanings and each meaning leads to the different strategies. The meaning of "taking away something" suggests a direct subtraction, while the meaning of "determining the difference between two numbers" is more likely to be modeled as indirect addition. Many prior researches found that the second meaning and…