In this laboratory experiment, upper-division undergraduate chemistry and biochemistry majors investigate amide-bond-forming reactions from a green chemistry perspective. Using hydrocinnamic acid and benzylamine as reactants, students perform three types of amide-forming reactions: an acid chloride derivative route; a coupling reagent promoted…

The Singaporean education system has recently shifted emphasis from being highly centralised and standardised towards one that aims to promote innovation and autonomy at the school level. Yet, the concomitant move towards a more decentralised and flexible curriculum enacted and controlled at the local level has not been straightforward.…

This paper makes a reflection on the assessment of historical thinking in compulsory education. First, the article reflects on the type of knowledge that is being evaluated (memory or understanding). According to current thinking, assessment should meet the teaching aims set out by the teacher, it should be another means of monitoring and…

The mandate for living sustainably is becoming increasingly urgent. This article reports on the Climate Clever Energy Savers (CCES) Program, a student-centred, problem- and project-based program in New South Wales, Australia, aimed at enabling school students to identify ways of reducing their schools' electricity consumption and costs. As part of…

This article describes student perceptions and outcomes in relation to the use of a novel interteaching approach. The study sample (n = 260) was taken from a large human physiology class, which included both first- and second-year students. However, unlike the first-year students, the second-year students had significant prior knowledge, having…

Collecting (or "sampling") information that one expects to be useful is a powerful way to facilitate learning. However, relatively little is known about how people decide which information is worth sampling over the course of learning. We describe several alternative models of how people might decide to collect a piece of information…

This article explores how a one-time training designed to support learning transfer affected 4-H volunteers' comfort levels with the training content and how comfort levels, in turn, affected the volunteers' application of tools and techniques learned during the training. Results of a follow-up survey suggest that the training participants…

Education, as it was initially organized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was designed to meet very different challenges than those we face today. There have been many efforts to shift education to address new contexts that result from societal transformation. There have also been international initiatives in response to…

It is advocated that flipped learning environment has the potential to affect student learning outcomes in a positive way. However, very few previous research findings are available to support this. Additionally, postulated that flipped learning has not caught on in social sciences. The current study explored whether students' specific learning…

This article is about teaching art-based inquiry and equity pedagogy. The author introduces an aesthetic-inspired afterschool curriculum in the urban context in the United States and theorizes the meaning of active citizenship and community. Conceptually framed by "community without community," this article explicates the ways in which…

There has been a rapid increase in the number of North Korean defectors (NKDs) entering South Korea, and the remarkable trend of NKDs is their demographic transition; the defectors in their 20s and 30s now constitute a majority among NKDs in South Korea. In this sense, this study aims to explore North Korean young adult defectors' (referred to…

Social studies teachers are asked to do the seemingly impossible: cover a broad array of content during the school year while also instilling critical reading and writing skills and developing a broadly defined civic identity. How can they effectively prepare to meet these ambitious goals? In this guide, I argue for the place of personalized…

A literature review on formative feedback and problem and project-based learning was conducted to determine a conceptual relationship between the two processes. This review resulted in the development of a conceptual model that is designed to guide instructional designers to integrate effective feed-up, feedback and feed-forward in the design and…

This STEM Smart brief describes the challenges of implementing the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) as well as research and promising practices in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development adopting the NGSS.

This book presents a unique perspective from an underrepresented region in the Global South. The volume features four different countries in the region: Barbados, Guyana, St. Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Martinique, an island located just north of St. Lucia which is an overseas region of France. It documents innovations in learning…