Parallel to the increasing level of maturity of the field of research on higher education, an increasing number of scholarly works aims at synthesising and presenting overviews of the field. We identify three important pitfalls these previous studies struggle with, i.e. a limited scope, a lack of a content-related analysis, and/or a lack of an…

Using problems from real life contexts which is related to learners' environment or their culture plays an important role in their learning that concept. In this regard, science educators especially physics educators search for real-life domain of theoretical concepts for effective science teaching and they consider analogical and physical models…

The international education community has long recognized the unique and important contribution that American-style institutions, such as the American University in Beirut, play in the quality of education offered around the world (Bertelsen, 2012). Not as well recognized, however, are institutions across the globe that adopt American or Western…

In this paper it is demonstrated how the free, and easily downloadable, software package called SMath Studio can be used to set up a model of alpha-particle scattering. The basic physics of the motion of an alpha-particle in the nuclear coulomb field is used to produce a simple stepwise computer algorithm which, in conjunction with a novel set of…

The "Vision and Change" report called for the biology community to mobilize around teaching the core concepts of biology. This essay describes a collection of resources developed by several different groups that can be used to respond to the report's call to transform undergraduate education at both the individual course and departmental…

The 3P (presage, process, product) model was introduced as a conceptualisation to underpin research into students' approaches to learning (SAL). This paper proposes the refocusing of the 3P model by formulating the initial presage phase as a teaching and learning environment, thus making the 3P model more consistent with SAL research which…

School refusal is heterogeneous in aetiology and presentation. The heterogeneity in its presentation, the focus of this study, complicates the conceptualisation and assessment of school refusal. The present study documents the development of a descriptive model of school refusal that was used to inform the development of a questionnaire for…

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) has been at the center of a national conversation around the necessity to strengthen the STEM workforce starting with STEM education in K-12 schools. "The Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013) incorporate a prominent engineering component in both disciplinary…

In this article the authors describe a model that starts from the basics of the OWL (observe, wonder, learn) large-group discussion strategy then moves onto new experiences that serve as the jumping off point for student-generated questions and investigations. The OWL version of a KWL (Know-Want to Know-Learn) process becomes a path to language…

An assessment of graphic literacy was developed by articulating and subsequently validating a skills-based cognitive model intended to substantiate the plausibility of score interpretations. Model validation involved use of multiple sources of evidence derived from large-scale field testing and cognitive labs studies. Data from large-scale field…

The Ministry of Education in New Zealand in 2013 provided funding for universities to develop and implement initial teacher education programmes with innovative school-university partnerships to promote the success of graduates. To enhance the success of this new programme, four teacher educators reviewed the literature on school-university…

In this paper, we build on a previously developed notion of 'learning as Making' to examine mathematics thinking and learning in a highly transformative and technological Making environment: one that involves a handheld 3D printing technology which enables 3D models to be created instantly via one's moving hand. In particular, we present two…

Excluded-volume interactions are ubiquitous to modeling the average size of polymers in solution. This paper shows how simulations can be used by students to explore the emergence of mathematical scaling relations from excluded-volume interactions. Simulations provide robust visual representations of the system, and can be used to investigate a…

Research synthesis on simple yet general hypotheses and ideas is challenging in scientific disciplines studying highly context-dependent systems such as medical, social, and biological sciences. This study shows that machine learning, equation-free statistical modeling of artificial intelligence, is a promising synthesis tool for discovering novel…

The researchers employed a confirmatory tetrad analysis (CTA) using partial least squares--structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with Outcome Questionnaire--45.2 (OQ-45) data, examining the measurement model of the OQ-45 scores with a sample of male adult clients (N = 1,558) receiving individual therapy at a university-based community counseling…