The Purdue Polytechnic Institute was created two years ago from the former College of Technology. This was more than a name change; it represented a transformation which will have an impact not only the curriculum, but on learning, and teaching methods. Students need technical skills but they must also be able to collaborate, be problem solvers,…

Asynchronous communication may have a profound impact on employee collaboration and productivity in the workplace due to the loss of face-to-face interaction and the relationships these opportunities may foster. However, as broadly defined within the literature, synchronous communication is a rich media that supports this type of collaboration and…

This paper presents findings from a two-year qualitative case study of a new, break-the-mold public elementary school. This school focused on reforming traditional models of instruction with student-centered learning in order to engage and better address the needs of all students. Using a constructivist perspective to understand the dynamics of…

Background: Though active-learning instruction has the potential to positively impact the preparation and diversity of STEM graduates, not all instructors are able to achieve this potential. One important factor is the teacher knowledge that instructors possess, including their pedagogical knowledge. Pedagogical knowledge is the knowledge about…

Little is known about how university institutions are coping with increased placement demands in professional disciplines, and what this means for the quality and integrity of the Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) experiences offered within degree programs for all partners concerned. The first stage of a critical ethnographic study is reported in…

Science teachers' practical knowledge of inquiry-based learning influence their beliefs about science teaching and learning. The Indonesian Curriculum released in 2013 has required teachers to teach science via inquiry-based approaches. In fact, some previous studies have found that teachers have difficulties in practically implementing the…

This paper studies electrical engineering learners' preferences for learning methods with various degrees of activity. Less active learning methods such as homework and peer reviews are investigated, as well as a newly introduced very active (constructive) learning method called "slectures," and some others. The results suggest that…

Guiding inquiry learning has been shown to increase knowledge gains. Yet, little is known about the effect of guidance on attitudes and behaviours, its interaction with student attributes, and transfer of impact once guidance is removed. We address these gaps in the context of an interactive Physics simulation on electric circuits…

This article is about designing and implementing PowerPoint-based interactive simulations for use in International Relations (IR) introductory undergraduate classes based on core pedagogical literature, models of human skill acquisition, and previous research on simulations in IR teaching. We argue that simulations can be usefully employed at the…

When projects are the spine of a course, they are systematically sequenced one after the other, and they do the heavy lifting of the course. They teach its core content and skills. The author has been testing this model of course design for several years, aiming for experiential learning that is tied to deep rather than superficial learning of…

Implementation of active-learning practices into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses has been shown to increase student learning and performance, improve retention of material, and reduce achievement gaps among different student populations when compared to lecture-based approaches. To this end, we transformed two…

Especially, during the first year in university, absenteeism can have detrimental effects on grades and social integration of the student in the university community. According to pedagogical literature, altering teaching methods from lecturing toward engaging teaching, which applies various active teaching methods in the university classroom, can…

In this article, we present the results of an implementation of a teaching-learning sequence that offered the opportunity to increase preservice elementary teachers' engagement with authentic activities in meteorology. In particular, we describe the results of a teaching-learning sequence with regard to the representation of winds on weather maps…

In this paper, we report on the results of an experiment in teaching discrete mathematics to students majoring in business informatics. We supplemented our problem-based approach to teaching the course with a set of Likert-scale surveys or questionnaires that helped improve the students' performance. On the one hand, these surveys gave us feedback…

This article describes a lesson plan that harnessed students' abilities to generate new teaching material by constructing country timelines. This involved "crowdsourcing," or the reliance upon task inputs from a large number of people to acquire information. The plan was motivated by an approach that conceives of learning as deriving…