The author provides a general model to incentivize student involvement in an economics course on an ongoing basis. Rather than presenting students with a discrete number of diverse experiments to illustrate different economic concepts, he opts for the adoption of a single experiment that lives for the duration of the semester. This approach…

Conversational technologies such as email, chat rooms, and blogs have made the transition from novel communication technologies to powerful tools for learning. Currently virtual worlds are undergoing the same transition. We argue that the next wave of innovation is at the level of the computer interface, and that mixed-reality environments offer…

Discusses methods of instruction which give students an opportunity to learn by doing. (SB)

This paper proposes a schema that will provide the analytical clarity needed for generating insights into pedagogical issues and, consequently, for developing curriculum efficiently. The schema has four terms: learning assumption, instructional hypothesis, teaching technique, and teacher performance. A learning assumption postulates that an…

Reports a classroom experiment by future teachers at the University of Iowa to compare a traditional teacher-managed method of instruction to a student-managed method. Subject matter was a data processing unit of a secondary school bookkeeping course. No significant differences in student achievement scores were found. (MF)

TEACHERS IN BIOLOGY, ENGLISH, HUMANITIES, MATHEMATICS, PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY AND AT VARIOUS JUNIOR COLLEGES IN FLORIDA TESTED THE VALUE OF ORIENTING COURSES TOWARD STUDENT PARTICIPATION AND AWAY FROM LECTURES. EACH INSTRUCTOR CONDUCTED ONE CONVENTIONAL COURSE AND ONE EXPERIMENTAL, LESS STRUCTURED COURSE COVERING…

The "Robot Roadshow Program" is designed to increase the interest of elementary school children in technical disciplines, specifically math and science. The program focuses on children from schools categorized as rural or underserved, which often have limited access to advanced technical resources. We developed the program using robots…