In this paper we report on the process, outcomes, and impact of a weekly homework assignment for which students write about the mathematics they do in their everyday lives. Data from 17 fifth-grade students suggest that after doing the assignment for a full school year, students clearly communicated their beliefs about the assignment having…

Health educators in elementary and secondary schools should seek collaborations with teachers of other subjects to enhance health education curriculum. The strategy described in this article details a potential collaboration between health education and language arts units. The activity enhances both drug education knowledge gains and creative…

The authors of this article work in a university-based teacher preparation program designed to prepare teachers to serve in urban, historically underserved schools. Entrance to the program is competitive. Preservice teachers are selected, in part, for their rich life experiences and interest in working in high-needs schools. Even with this…

This article proposes a theatrically oriented, thematically structured course model for the upper level undergraduate German curriculum. The traditional focus on staging a single play in the German foreign language theater practicum neglects theater's potential to explore other literary genres and cultural texts and runs the danger of…

The purpose of this study was to provide information that may improve or design technology professional development for family and consumer sciences teachers to integrate technology into student assignments. This study was designed to investigate (a) the extent to which Alabama family and consumer sciences teachers are requiring students to…

The use of hybrid learning (a blend of face-to-face and distance learning) is rapidly increasing in higher education. However, educational leaders have raised concerns about the proliferation of hybrid programming as an efficiency measure without appropriate attention to learning. This study examined the relationship between social, teaching and…

The development of preservice teacher beliefs is a complicated, non-linear process. It has been suggested that preservice teacher beliefs are highly impacted by their past histories as students, and that these beliefs act as a filter for interpreting the coursework and ideas in their teacher education programs. Understanding the way preservice…

Many tertiary-level courses assess students' participation in tutorial or online discussions. However, in educational and pedagogical research literature, criteria for assessing students' skills in engaging with peers remain unclear. This article describes an online assignment with a set of participation criteria and a method for assessing the…

The 12 Favorite Assignments featured in this article were presented at the 2011 Annual Convention of the Association for Business Communication (ABC), Montreal, Canada. A variety of learning objectives are featured: delivering bad news, handling difficult people, persuasion, reporting financial analysis, electronic media, face-to-face…

This case study of a Native American high school senior focuses on one of the final assignments he completed before dropping out of school early in the school year. The task was to draw a life map--a nonverbal text that identified 10 key life events on his journey to that point--as part of a larger unit on identity for his senior English class.…

There is mounting evidence to show that engineers need more than technical skills to succeed in industry. This paper describes a curriculum innovation in which so-called "soft" skills, specifically inter-personal and intra-personal skills, were integrated into a final year mining engineering course. The instructional approach was…

Manycore systems have emerged as being one of the dominant architectural trends in next-generation computer systems. These highly parallel systems are expected to be interconnected via packet-based networks-on-chip (NoC). The complexity of such systems poses novel and exciting challenges in academia, as teaching their design requires the students…

Peer assessment of long written tasks poses particular problems as these tasks typically involve complex learning and solving ill-structured problems which require divergent responses. Marking reliability of this kind of writing task is difficult to achieve. The author illustrates this through an evaluation of two implementations of peer…

In October, Myanmar's pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, got a quirky request on YouTube. A hyperactive instructor in a plaid jacket posted a video inviting her to do a Skype interview with his "World Regions" geography class at Virginia Tech. Ms. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate often compared to Nelson Mandela, might have…

This article examines the effectiveness of a collaborative group learning project for teaching a core competency in comparative politics: constitutional structures. We use a quasi-experimental design and propensity score matching to assess the value of a constitutional writing group project and presentation. The results provide strong evidence…