Frustrated by the generic statements that her Year 12 students were making about sources, Jacqueline Vyrnwy-Pierce resolved to undertake a research project into how her students were approaching sources about the French Revolution. Fascinated by the research of American educational psychologist Sam Wineburg, Vyrnwy-Pierce decided to use Wineburg's…

We introduce the Integrated Framework of Multiple Texts to understand how students use and form connections between multiple texts to accomplish personal or task goals. The Integrated Framework of Multiple Texts conceptualizes students' multiple text use as unfolding over the course of three stages--preparation, execution, and production. In the…

The majority of undergraduates own a smartphone, yet fewer than half view it as a valuable learning technology. Consequently, a digital laboratory notebook (DLN) was developed for an upper-division undergraduate biochemistry laboratory course using the free mobile application Evernote. The cloud-based DLN capitalized on the unique features of…

Lessons in community building and cultural understanding are important aspects of a 21st-century education. Through such lessons, students gain the keys to societal understanding as they gain knowledge about their cultural and historical contexts, and use that understanding as a setting for exploration of deeper values, emotional experiences, and…

Human sexuality courses are common across many college/university campuses. The methods of instruction typically encourage discussion to increase knowledge and critical thinking about self, relationships, and professional pathways. However, often the pedagogical practices do not include methods to draw out students with a range of personalities,…

In this article, the author presents one instructional strategy--scribing--tailored to the Tablet PC. He illustrates the role of the scribe during discussion through two classroom examples: (1) generalizing the polygon sum theorem; and (2) proving the third angle theorem. Then he analyzes scribing as an instructional strategy as well as students'…

This paper describes an experiment carried out at International Pacific College (IPC) as part of an EAP (English for Academic Purposes) paper taught in year one of the BA programme. The trial was aimed at instilling students with the motivation to self-monitor their pronunciation, attempting to raise it to an internationally acceptable level of…

This report describes the effects of making audio podcasts of all lectures in a large, basic biochemistry course promptly available to students. The audio podcasts complement a previously described approach in which a tablet PC is used to annotate PowerPoint slides with digital ink to produce electronic notes that can be archived. The fundamentals…

Typically, high school is the hardest place to integrate a project-based learning approach. The issues for high school are many, including: (1) Students are available for only an hour a day (except in blockscheduled schools); (2) Teachers specialize in certain subject areas; (3) Teachers feel pressured to prepare students for tests and college.…

Many college students are paying others to attend lecture classes and take notes, a practice that angers many professors and caused one university to sue a note-taking company over copyrights. Although students and some faculty say the notes are helpful in large, impersonal classes, others say they encourage poor attendance. (MSE)

A high school mathematics teacher designed an action research project to help students learn effective notetaking for studying and for organizing and remembering information. Fifty students completed questionnaires about their notetaking habits and ways to improve them. After discussing survey findings, students designed their own formats and…

Within the context of traditional quality management principles, a program designed to enhance soft skills of College Algebra students was piloted in fall 2001. Results of the pilot project include increased retention, persistence, note-taking ability, and positive responses concerning course expectations. Quality enhancement efforts in this…

Studentship, the focus of this study, is the process by which students react to the demands of the training environment. It consists of a perspective on the process of professional training that allows students to determine which dispositions they intend to acquire and which they will choose to ignore. Studentship also consists of an array of…

To improve throughput rates in higher education it is important to investigate ways in which instruction can be made more effective when students have to use language(s) that are not their home or primary language. At the University of Stellenbosch, as is the case elsewhere in South Africa, a language policy and implementation plan was formulated…

Peer leading of small-group discussion of cases; use of modified subjective, objective, assessment of physiology (SOAP) notes; and opportunities for self-assessment were introduced into a Medical Physiology course to increase students' awareness and practice of professional behaviors. These changes arose from faculty members' understanding of the…