To promote math and science, this author designed an activity to show students that biomedical fields are within their reach. The activity has three distinct goals: (1) To introduce the field of biomedical engineering to students and encourage them in these career pursuits; (2) To give them hands-on experience conducting a biomechanical test; and…

This research examines the emotional themes and discourse of emotion of early childhood educators using a post-structuralist theoretical framework of emotion. The data selected and analyzed is taken from 4 two-hour discussion groups that were conducted over an eight-week period with four female early childhood educators. The emotional themes and…

A new free graphical teaching tool that highlights the beautiful organic architectures of the top selling pharmaceuticals is detailed on two posters. In addition to the multitude of teaching and data-mining opportunities these posters offer, they were also created to emphasize the central role organic chemists play in the development of new…

How can teachers encourage their geography students to make sense of big numbers? The key math skills geography students need to apply are ones they learned long ago in fifth grade: estimation and place value. However, in order to recognize the size of a city, or strength of a country's per capita income, or value of a birth rate, they need…

Designing manipulative ecological experiments is a complex and time-consuming process that is problematic to teach in traditional undergraduate classes. This study investigates the effectiveness of using a computer simulation--the Virtual Rocky Shore (VRS)--to facilitate rapid, student-centred learning of experimental design. We gave a series of…

This year-long ethnographic study examined teacher and student discourse when interpreting text in a children's philosophy club. Specifically, the study investigated how the opportunities for learning a new discussion form, philosophical conversation, were acted, talked, and written into being as students and their teacher interacted with each…

In the first part of this dissertation, I document wiki usage in U.S. K-12 settings by analyzing data on a representative sample drawn from a population of nearly 180,000 wikis. My research group, which I lead and managed, measured the opportunities wikis provide for students to develop 21st century skills such as expert thinking, complex…

"Children as Researchers in Primary Schools" is an innovative and unique resource for practitioners supporting children to become "real world" researchers in the primary classroom. It will supply you with the skills and ideas you need to implement a "children as researchers" framework in your school that can be adapted for different ages and…

Today's healthcare can be characterised by the increasing importance of specialisation that requires cooperation across disciplines and specialities. In view of the number of educational programmes for interdisciplinary cooperation, surprisingly little is known on how learning arises from interdisciplinary work. In order to analyse the learning…

Background: It has been widely accepted that reflective teaching is a powerful component of effective teaching. Accordingly, educating reflective practitioners has been a major goal of teacher education. Reflective teaching refers to the act of thinking such as analyzing or assessing educational meanings, intentions, beliefs, decisions, actions,…

This study explores the effect of the artistic pedagogical technology (APT) called photovoice (PV) on interaction in the online post-secondary classroom. More specifically, this paper focuses on students' perspectives regarding the effect of PV on student to student and student to instructor interactions in online courses. Artistic pedagogical…

Educational researchers and teachers are well aware that misconceptions--erroneous ideas that differ from the scientifically accepted ones--are very common amongst students. Daily experiences, creative and perceptive thinking and science textbooks give rise to students' misconceptions which lead them to draw erroneous conclusions that become…

Today's important geo-spatial technologies, GIS (Geographic Information Systems), GPS (Global Positioning Systems) and Google Earth have been widely used in geography education. Transferring spatially oriented data taken by GPS to the GIS and Google Earth has provided great benefits in terms of showing the usage of spatial technologies for field…

Many universities and colleges have placed increased emphasis on teaching excellence in higher education. Efforts to promote teaching excellence vary from the development of alternative new pedagogies as well as research exploring strategies to improve existing teaching practices. Logically, different disciplines employ different instructional…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the nature of the preservice teachers' (PSTs) reflections on their practices in the context of the Iterative Model Building (IMB) approach. Participants were elementary PSTs enrolled in a field experience course in the spring of 2009. The field experience included formative assessment interviews,…