Recent reading research has shown teachers how to help students comprehend and has identified strategies that good comprehenders use. At the same time, however, researchers report that few if any of these techniques are used in classrooms. Reading teachers and content area teachers alike need to be able to design lessons that help students…

The authors present a simplified, "stripped-down" version of poker as an instructional classroom game. Although Stripped-Down Poker is extremely simple, it nevertheless provides an excellent illustration of a number of topics: signaling, bluffing, mixed strategies, the value of information, and Bayes's Rule. The authors begin with a description of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships of the students' perceived levels of collaborative learning, social presence and overall satisfaction in a blended learning environment. This research studied the relationship of these three variables and identified critical factors related to them. The participants were 48 graduate…

Creating effective mathematics lessons can be a challenge for any teacher. One approach to design an effective lesson is using a before-during-after (BDA) format. This article describes what a BDA format is and provides two examples of how it is implemented in high school mathematics classes. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)

This article reflects on the basic notions of user-design as they have been expressed through the preparation of a text, "User-Design", published early in 2007. It takes up several issues as extensions of the original work, including its usefulness for schoolteachers, the role of expertise in instructional design, and the role of design and design…

Our 5-year experiment with teaching and evaluating an inquiry course has led us to conclude that inquiry is a potent pedagogical tool in higher education, encouraging students to become self-directed and engaged learners. This article offers key ingredients and procedures for designing an inquiry-based course. It provides a pragmatic model of…

This article introduces "expertise-based training" (XBT) as an instructional design theory that draws on the theories, findings, and methods of expertise research in order to create instructional strategies that can hasten the development of advanced learners into experts. The central tenants of XBT are: 1) Key cognitive sub-skills that…

Educational technologists might well describe online distance education as "a series of instructional events over the Internet that find their expression as learning events in a student". As a legal construct however, "online distance education" is simply "the intellectual property of its owner". This description is…

This paper analyses the design, implementation and assessment of a level 2 module for non-English major students in higher vocational and professional education. 1132001 is a code of module that uses active methods to teach college English in China. It specifically reflects on the module's advantage and defect for developing and improving learning…

This study examined the role of games in graduate-level instructional technology courses, where the curriculum includes complex abstract theory and hands-on, practical skills. A qualitative approach was used in the study, relying on classroom observations of student behavior (recorded by digital photographs), informal student verbal comments,…

This study described how online learning is enacted in a university setting by addressing what university students reported about their perceptions of the quality of their learning in online environments and what university students reported about the ways in which online learning experiences were enacted across a large university. Using…

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of instructional materials for the subject of classification of matter as solids, liquids and gases that were developed using a holistic instructional design model on student achievement. In the study a pre-test/post-test with control group experimental design was used. The study was conducted in the…

The study examined interest, a unique affective construct distinct from motivation, as an important instructional design consideration. New interest theory suggests that interest develops along a continuum, and at its earliest stages, may be triggered through intentional use of interesting materials and environments. Instructional designers need…

A real-time interactive distance lecture is a joint work that should be accomplished by the effort of the lecturer and his students in remote sites. It is important for the lecturer to get understanding information from the students which cannot be efficiently collected by only using video/audio channels between the lecturer and the students. This…

Virtual communities of practice (VCoP) have been advocated for some time as a promising means of taking professional development to teachers in widely distributed locations. However, geography, and indeed education literature as a whole, contains very few examples where this has been achieved. This paper reports on two VCoP professional…