Purpose: As the classrooms in higher education are growing increasingly diverse, it is imperative that higher education practitioners build a responsive learning environment for diverse learners to optimize their potential. Continuing professional development programmes (CPD) are central to such strategic approaches that equip educators with…

School districts across the country have identified priority areas aligned to school improvement plans, such as formative assessment, differentiated instruction, and posted learning targets. Several studies indicate that these areas, coupled with high-quality instruction, may have significant returns in terms of student learning (Marzano 2013;…

Many physics faculty are aware of and interested in using research-based instructional strategies. However, knowledge and motivation are not sufficient to support successful and sustained adoption. To address this problem, we present a faculty online learning community (FOLC) model for educational change and describe its application (the New…

United Arab Emirates nationals ('Emiratis') constitute less than 10% of the resident population of Dubai. Despite having access to free education in the public sector, where Arabic is the medium of instruction, more Emirati families in Dubai choose to enrol their children in private schools (specifically English-medium schools) than public ones,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the alignment between the fourth-grade summative classroom assessments and the 'Matter and Energy' unit in the Lebanese science curriculum using: content and cognitive levels. Summative assessments were collected from a sample of 17 schools. The alignment between the classroom assessments and the…

Purpose: This article examines high school students' understanding of the welfare state as a political issue and discusses how it can be approached in the classroom. The study was conducted within a social-science educational context and departs from a perspective from which educational goals can be seen as intrinsic (goals closely connected to…

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is making it a requirement of all schools within the Emirates (both public and private) to follow a programme of moral education (MEP), at all ages from grades 1 to 13, which is designed centrally. Explicitly secular and humanist in its approach, this is a remarkable development in a country where Islam is the…

While most of the research on gender and subject level differences has been conducted with same group of students studying different subjects, these differences have been comparatively less examined at college/ university level among postgraduate students enrolled in different study domains. This paper presents the results of the multivariate…

This article investigates how learning outcomes, a concept inspired by an Anglo-Saxon curriculum approach, are expressed in policy documents, with an emphasis on expectations articulated to teachers. Developments in education policy for the last two decades reflect a widespread expansion of learning outcome orientation in curricula and assessment…

We present the design, statistical analysis, and validation of a questionnaire to assess students' knowledge about basic aspects of quantum mechanics (QM). The QM evaluation (QME) is a true-false and multiple-choice mixed questionnaire that features 10 two-tier items spanning three relevant themes in quantum mechanics: wave behavior of matter,…

Learning frameworks are tools that specify learning outcomes and/or competencies that define, classify, and recognize educational, learner, and industry expectations of knowledge, skills, and abilities at increasing levels of complexity and difficulty. They allow for alignment, translation, and mapping of learning through various spaces in order…

This service plan outlines how the Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training (British Columbia) will support the government's priorities, including selected action items identified in the Minister's Mandate Letter. Over the previous fiscal year, the Ministry made progress on these priorities including: (1) Negotiated a new Workforce…

An instructional model can unite school leaders, teachers, and students with shared goals, a shared understanding of how to reach the goals, and a shared vocabulary for discussing progress. In this paper, the authors present an introduction to instructional models and a leadership primer focused on helping school teams cohere around an initiative…

This paper provides a brief overview of the current state of federal accountability and the need for change, and a summary of the landscape of state accountability reforms through funding structures for public colleges and universities. It explores key questions or decision points that must be addressed in designing a federal accountability system…

DegreePlus is a recently developed program at Western Carolina University (WCU) that aims to develop transferable skills, including professionalism, cultural responsiveness, leadership and teamwork, in students via their participation in extracurricular activities. A mixed-methods study that included focus groups and a survey was used to identify…