A call for a bridge between research and practice is nothing new, yet it seems to be an impossible task to accomplish. Despite the dedicated efforts made by numerous researchers in the past, the world is still largely separate between researchers and teachers. One piece of evidence is that research studies seem to have only a little impact on…

Students in introductory programming classes often articulate their questions and information needs incompletely. Consequently, the automatic classification of student questions to provide automated tutorial responses is a challenging problem. This dissertation analyzes 411 questions from an introductory Java programming course by reducing the…

Antibiotic resistance, genetically modified produce, avian flu, and invasive species persistence are just a few scientific issues pulled from the headlines that affect society on a daily basis. Understanding these issues requires knowledge of evolutionary processes. Educating students about evolution may never have been as necessary as it is…

In an effort to provide career and technical education (CTE) professionals with additional insight on how to better meet the individual education needs of the learner, this study (a) sought to identify the predominant personality type of postsecondary automotive technology students and (b) examined whether there was a relationship between the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the current trends in and future prospects for distance education in primary, secondary, and higher education in China. Design/methodology/approach: This article reviews relevant literature and cases, and explores the current situation of distance education in China. Findings: The use of…

How elementary pre-service teacher candidates with considerable experience in clinical field placements identified, photographed, discussed, and categorized samples of what they construed as democratic citizenship education occurring within elementary classrooms was explored in this study. Candidates discussed an initial set of captioned photos…

This paper reports on data collected via an audience response system, where a convenience sample of 300 adults aged 17-50 pressed a button to register their answers for twenty multiple choice questions. The responses were then discussed with the respondents at the time. The original dataset includes physics, biology and chemistry questions. The…

Active-learning techniques have been advocated as a means to promote student engagement in lower-division biology courses. In this case study, mini-lectures in combination with active-learning activities were evaluated as strategies to promote a culture of learning and participation in a required botany course. These activities were designed to…

Objective: This teaching strategy provides students with an opportunity to promote women's health literacy via construction of a creative health information booklet. Students will be able to: (1) Identify health issues that affect women during one particular lifespan stage; (2) Categorize issues according to the seven dimensions of health; (3)…

Elementary teachers of science are at a great advantage because observation--collecting information about the world using the five senses--and classification--sorting things by properties--come so naturally to children. Many examples of classification occur in science: Scientists, for example, group things starting with large categories, such as…

Virtual K-12 schools have rapidly become a popular choice for parents and students in the last decade. However, little research has been done on the instructional practices used in virtual courses. As reflected in the central research question, the purpose of this study was to explore how teachers provided instruction for Grade 7-10 students in…

The study was aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of Instructional Strategies based on Gagne's Instructional Design and Conventional Strategies of teaching science in improving the "Thinking Skills" of secondary school students. The seven "Thinking Skills" suggested by Raths, Louis (1967) namely, "Observation,"…

An emerging trend in classrooms is the use of networked visual argumentation tools that allow students to discuss, debate, and argue with one another in a synchronous fashion about topics presented by a teacher. These tools are aimed at teaching students how to discuss and argue, important skills not often taught in traditional classrooms. But how…

The role of conversational interaction in second language research has increasingly been seen as playing a facilitative role in second language learning. As such there have been a number of studies focussing on different types of interaction, including feedback such as recasts, and their potential role in second language learning. In this study,…

A classification system that was developed for the use of agent-based models was applied to strategies used by school-aged students to interrogate an agent-based model and a system dynamics model. These were compared, and relationships between learning outcomes and the strategies used were also analysed. It was found that the classification system…