Between 2000 and 2016, the STEM industry reportedly added jobs at the rate of 28% while all jobs were growing at only 6%. However, 48% of bachelor's degree students and 69% of associate's degree students in STEM majors left their program of study between 2003 and 2009. The high attrition rate is often attributed to low student engagement, boredom,…

Examining repeated classroom encounters over time provides a comprehensive picture of activities. Studies of instructional practices in classrooms have traditionally relied on two methods: classroom observations, which are expensive, and surveys, which are limited in scope and accuracy. Teacher logs provide a "real-time" method for…

While the literature emphasizes the importance of teaching political science students methods skills, there currently exists little guidance for how to assess student learning over the course of their time in the major. To address this gap, we develop a model set of assessment tools that may be adopted and adapted by political science departments…

Student comments are routinely collected in university evaluation surveys for the purpose of improving teaching and learning. Whilst student comments provide valuable insights into their experiences, there is limited published research reporting the extent to which student comments are offensive and professional. The aim of this study was to…

Lauded as a rewarding pedagogical approach, community-engagement can be time-consuming, resource-intensive, and difficult for instructors to manage for effective student learning outcomes. Collaborative teaching can allow instructors working in the same classroom to draw from each others' expertise and share resources. In this essay, we propose a…

The existing literature on indicators of an optimal learning environment for high-ability students frequently discusses the concept of challenge. It is, however, not clear what, precisely, constitutes appropriate challenge for these students. In this study, the authors examined an undergraduate honours course, Advanced Cell Biology, which has…

Education for sustainability (EfS) in higher education is an emerging specialisation within the general field of EfS. EfS encompasses cognitive, affective and behavioural aspects, and aims at enhancing a variety of learning outcomes in these domains and reaching students from all programmes. One of the main challenges for higher education…

As institutions offer more online courses in their teacher certification and literacy master's programs, research is needed to address issues of quality assurance in online instruction. This multicase study analyzes qualitatively elements for addressing quality assurance of the implementation of an online content literacy teacher education course…

This article provides a personal perspective about the development of the seminal papers associated with the Community of Inquiry Framework. The framework and its construction are described. The main part of the paper explores the evolution of the framework and its associated methodology. Finally, research associated with the validation of the…

In this paper, we share two blended learning approaches used at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. We have been using these two approaches in the last twelve years in many courses ranging from the diploma to graduate programs. For the first blended learning approach, we integrated one asynchronous communication tool with face to…

This study investigated whether two different versions of an online professional development course produced different impacts on the intended outcomes of the course. Variations of an online course for middle school algebra teachers were created for two experimental conditions. One was an actively facilitated course with asynchronous peer…

The web has the potential to offer an environment that can support standardized medical education to students dispersed in time or place and, in the process, respond to reduced availability of patients for practice. This exploratory article describes how we evaluated critical thinking in an online collaborative Problem-based Learning (PBL)…

Curriculum integration and working in teams are two key characteristics of middle schooling in Australia today. As part of a new primary/middle teacher education program an interdisciplinary team of academics has developed a course that aims to teach pre service teachers how to plan for and teach an integrated curriculum unit in an authentic…