Cross-sector educational reform to be implemented in 2012 in Hong Kong (HK) is intended principally to prepare students for the future workplace. One of the explicit requirements for the new four-year undergraduate curriculum is the inclusion of a capstone course for final year students. This paper explores the uptake and reported effect of the…

This paper presents a curriculum and design analyses of an Emmy-award winning children educational television series, Cyberchase. Using Posner's (2004) four process of curriculum analysis framework, this paper addresses each of the components and relates it to the design principles undertaken by the Cyberchase production team. Media and document…

Over the past two decades, neuroscientists have been fascinated by the way the brain processes music. Using new technologies, neuroscientists offer us a better understanding of the human brain's structures and functions. They have further proposed explanatory models for how the brain processes music. While these models shed light on how the…

Most product development work in industrial practice is incremental, i.e., the company has had a product in production and on the market for some time, and now time has come to design an upgraded variant. This type of redesign project requires that the engineering designers have competences to carry through an analysis of the existing product…

The study uses teacher identity as a lens to explore how teachers make sense of their work and constitute professional identities in the often complex world of teaching and learning. Three teachers who completed the same teacher preparation program and taught in the same school district were observed and interviewed for the study in 2009-2010. A…

It is important, but very challenging, to design degree programs, so that the sequence of learning activities, topics, and assessments over three to five years give an effective progression in learning of generic skills, discipline-specific learning goals and accreditation competencies. Our CUSP (Course and Unit of Study Portal) system tackles…

Columbia University offers two innovative undergraduate science-based bioethics courses for student majoring in biosciences and pre-health studies. The goals of these courses are to introduce future scientists and healthcare professionals to the ethical questions they will confront in their professional lives, thus enabling them to strategically…

Since the early 1980s, a number of initiatives have been undertaken worldwide which have involved scientists and teachers working together in projects designed to support the science learning of students. Many of these have attempted to establish school-scientist partnerships. In these, scientists, teachers, and students formed teams engaged in…

With the integration of engineering into science instruction, teachers have been seeking ways to add engineering in their classrooms. This article presents a primary (K-2) STEM unit that took place in a half-day kindergarten classroom as a way to address the scientific and engineering practices (dimension 1, p.41) and the disciplinary core idea…

The massification and globalization of higher education, combined with the widespread adoption of processes underpinning accreditation and quality control of university programs, have tended to result in learning contexts that are increasingly narrowly conceived and tightly controlled. Underlying many quality control measures is a "one size…

As an advanced rhetoric and composition doctoral student, I taught Engl 3135: Visual Rhetoric, a three-credit upper-level course offered by the Department of English at Georgia State University. Mary E. Hocks originally designed this course in 2000 to, in her words, "introduce visual information design theories and practices for writers [and]…

This review reports selected literature on theory, research, and practice in disciplinary literacy, primarily reading. The authors consider the ways this literature can be viewed through the lens of Lee S. Shulman's theory of Pedagogical Content Knowledge, which includes: subject matter content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and…

This article describes a newly designed upper division German language course, "Contemporary Germany: Food, Energy Politics," and two sampling methods of assessment for measuring parallel gains in German skills and sustainable development (SD) thinking. Second Language Acquisition (SLA) informed course design, key assignments, and…

An opportunity for teachers to join 80 outstanding biological sciences undergraduates in a series of practical sessions and lectures at the 2010 Gatsby Plant Science Summer School has inspired the development of teaching and learning resources for use in schools. Plant scientists have a crucial role to play in society and it is hoped that the…

The integration of one's curriculum is an approach to education that ignores subject-matter lines of delineation, thus allowing faculty to bring together the separate pieces of a curriculum into a coherent whole that facilitates meaningful associations across subject matter. Before taking on the challenge of curriculum integration, faculty…