Improving students' ability to recognize work-related problems and apply effective strategies and solutions to fundamental challenges in the field is at the crux of a good college preparation. This paper attempts to investigate if active-learning strategies improve students' critical thinking ability in this regard. Participants were pre-service…

Civic engagement in higher education encompasses a diversity of goals, strategies and activities. These include particular approaches to teaching and learning--community-based or service learning--which share an explicit civic focus and combine the features of experiential learning with opportunities for engagement. A range of…

Service-learning can mean different things and look quite different in varying statistics curricula that may include undergraduates, graduates, majors and non-majors across a wide array of higher institutions. The terms community engagement, volunteerism, community-based projects and service-learning are tossed around on various institutions'…

Learning in today's classrooms can be disconnected from students' real world experiences. Providing students the opportunity to address real-world problems may provide avenues for students to engage in their communities while developing academic skills and knowledge. Additionally, for students whose interests are piqued by the nature of their…

This study connected secondary-education teacher candidates with diverse populations through community-based service learning activities in the first year of college. Through this experience these students learned more about themselves and most importantly about others. They expressed increased cultural competence that reinforced their desire to…

In 2008, Macquarie University instituted the Participation and Community Engagement (PACE) initiative. This initiative embeds units in the curriculum that involve learning through participation (LTP) that is mutually beneficial to the student, the University and the organisation or community in which student participation activities take place.…

Educators can provide opportunities for active learning for the students by engaging them in client-based projects with the community, which enhances application of theory and provides students with the relevance demanded from the business community. Experiential learning opportunities through client-based projects provide for such an experience.…

Service learning (SL) is a widely utilized strategy in higher education for providing direct real world experiences that relate to course content (Freeman & Knopf, 2007). Research suggests that SL experiences are successful in changing cultural and social bias (Dunn-Kenney, 2010) while helping to reinforce the learning objectives in both…

This paper reports on a project in which students designed, constructed and tested a model of an existing early warning system with simulation of debris flow in a context of a landslide. Students also assessed rural community members' knowledge of this system and subsequently taught them to estimate the time needed for evacuation of the community…

In "Democracy and Education," Dewey (1916) proposed that a primary role of higher education should be to renew and strengthen students' commitment to active civic life. More recently Campus Compact, a consortium of college and university presidents committed to community service, challenged higher education to "re-examine its…

Theories of situated knowledge support that knowledge involves experience of practices rather than just accumulated information. While an important segment of foreign language teacher education programs focuses on the theoretical component of second/foreign language acquisition theories and relevant methodological concerns, it is mainly through…

A thematic course called "Climate Change: Chemistry and Controversy" was developed for upper-level non-STEM students. This course used the socioscientific context of climate change to teach chemical principles and the nature of science. Students used principles of agnotology (direct study of misinformation) to debunk climate change…

This article provides an overview of the use of service learning in the middle schools as a way to instill and foster civic responsibility and citizenship in students. In addition to a discussion about service learning's major aspects, the authors provide concrete examples of how to implement service learning across the curriculum in middle school…

Teaching empowers students to find their own voice, critically evaluate the arguments presented to them, create meaningful knowledge by applying content to the real world, and be open to the diverse perspectives of those around them. These ideas are fundamental to feminist pedagogy, which views the classroom as a community of learners where the…

In this paper, authors (a) identified accounting anxiety for the educator and the student as a possible explanation for the decline in accounting education and (b) investigated new methods for teaching accounting at the secondary and postsecondary levels that will increase interest in accounting education as well as decrease educator and student…