This paper details a proposed doctoral student connections program that is based on sociocultural theory. It is designed to assist new students with starting their educational journey. This program is designed to leverage social interactions, peer mentorship, personal reflection, purposeful planning, and existing resources to assist students in…

This article describes uses for podcasts in music education, focusing on learner-created podcasts as an opportunity for students to construct and represent knowledge. The author outlines a podcast assignment that enables secondary and postsecondary students to examine and more deeply understand the meaning music holds for them and the role it has…

Distance learning has become increasingly popular among higher learning institutions, and more academic disciplines, such as mathematics, are now being offered at a distance. This experimental study investigated whether an objectivist-based teaching strategy or a constructivist-based teaching strategy yields greater achievement scores for adult…

Family-focused community education implies a relational pedagogy, whereby people of different ages and experiences, including children, engage interdependently in the education of selves and others. Educational projects grow out of lived experiences and relationships, evolving in dynamic conditions of community self-organisation and…

Since 2002, infrared spectroscopy (IR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometry have been introduced at the beginning of the first-semester organic chemistry lab course at this university. Starting in 2008, each individual student was given 20 unique homework problems that consisted of multiple-choice [superscript 1]H NMR and IR problems…

Few evident incentives exist for faculty to become involved with living-learning programs. The purpose of this constructivist grounded theory study was to investigate the motives and experiences of faculty members working with living-learning programs at doctoral-granting research institutions. Illuminating the experiences of living-learning…

More nontraditional, adult learners are entering higher education than ever before due to the continued growth in technology and current economic conditions that encourage adults to acquire additional skills for the workplace. The pressure for these students to do well in school and finish quickly can lead to increased anxiety associated with the…

Many authors stress the importance of basing teaching on students' prior knowledge. To build a bridge between students' everyday knowledge and scientific concepts, the role of metaphors and analogies came into the focus of the science education community during the past two decades. Approaches using metaphor-based teaching strategies often regard…

This report presents the findings of a case study of a novel professional development practice model for academic university staff developed by the Learning in Higher Education (LiHE) association. It describes the implementation of a social constructivist approach to professional development, characterised by various, structured collaborative…

Diagnostic and formative assessment practices have been widely endorsed in the educational research literature. This article reports the findings of a small-scale study which investigated the extent to which these practices have been embraced in classroom teaching. The interview data from six lecturers and six students at a polytechnic in…

After several years of political agendas focused on social inclusion, career guidance practice needs to return to its roots of promoting equality and social justice. This conceptual article argues that for many years there has been an overreliance on theories focused on the individual, and examines the relationship between social structures and…

This article describes some of the local Aotearoa New Zealand context of a general "mainstream" undergraduate counselling degree. Students' learning is shaped to produce a professional practice for the local context of Aotearoa New Zealand. As counsellor educators informed by social constructionism, we detail our theoretical position and…

The concept of "Education for Sustainable Development", ESD, has been introduced in a period where chemistry education is undergoing a major change, both in emphasis and methods of teaching. Studying an everyday problem, with an important socio-economic impact in the laboratory is a part of this approach. Presently, the students in many…

Since age and generation first started to be problematized, the focus has been on childhood, while adulthood has attracted less attention. In this article four examples are presented of how adulthood is constructed within the specific context of childhood research. Taking the departure in Deleuzian and actor network theories, four examples are…

Constructivism and intersectionality are used to explore one lesbian college student's multiple identities. These frameworks reveal how meaning-making contributes to power's influence on identity, while power shapes meaning-making. For this student, lesbian identity is a product of social class, dominant and subordinate norms, and interactions…