The purpose of this paper is to identify the types of students' interaction, as well as their discussion patterns in an online course. The study took place in a large Midwestern University and 17 graduate students participated in the study. The primary data was obtained from students' discussion forum postings. The researchers used both…

In collaborative learning environments, students work together on assignments in virtual teams and depend on each other's contribution to achieve their learning objectives. The online learning environment, however, may not only facilitate but also hamper group communication, coordination, and collaboration. Group awareness widgets that visualize…

Past studies have indicated shortcomings in the training of graduate students in the US, especially for practical career skills, teaching skills, and non-academic careers. Students thus find professional development and guidance lacking for the demands of the modern marketplace. This study extends this research to the unique situation of current…

The Chemistry Teaching Fellowship Program (CTFP) is offered to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers at the University of Toronto as an opportunity to undertake curriculum development and chemistry education research. Projects are run with faculty supervision and focus on designing new laboratory activities, lectures, tutorials,…

Social adjustment is one of the most difficult and long-lasting challenges for international students who study in a new country. This paper uses a case study of cooperative painting activity conducted in Australian setting, in which two Chinese and three other students from different countries participated, in order to assess the efficiency of…

Chinese students represent an increasing proportion of the student body in Canadian postsecondary institutions (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2015). While studying abroad, many of these students face linguistic and sociocultural challenges (Zhang, 2016), resulting in calls for Western instructors to provide linguistically and culturally…

The students' lack of motivation is a usual problem. The students value more the obtention of the degree than the developing of competences and skills. In order to fight this, we developed a gamification's experience based on merits and leaderboards. The merits are linked to the attainment of skills and competences that students usually do not…

Complex adaptive systems theory served as a framework for this qualitative study exploring the process of how meaning emerges from the collective interactions of individuals in a synchronous online discussion through their shared words about a topic. In an effort to bridge levels of analysis from the individual to the small group to the community,…

Institutions have developed diverse approaches that vary in effectiveness and cost to improve student performance in introductory science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses. We developed a low-cost, graduate student-led, metacognition-based study skills course taught in conjunction with the introductory biology series at Miami…

Teachers and educational institutions are attempting to find an appropriate strategy to motivate as well as engage students in the learning process. Institutions are encouraging the use of gamification in education for the purpose of improving the intrinsic motivation as well as engagement. However, the students' perspective of the issue is…

To promote graduate students' active learning, deep reading of high quality papers was done by graduate students enrolled in biochemistry and microbiology pharmacy curriculum offered by college of life science, Jiangxi Normal University from 2013 to 2015. The number of graduate students, who participated in the course in 2013, 2014, and 2015 were…

Education for Instruction Librarians has traditionally centered upon the acquisition of practical classroom skills. While this approach has merit, from a sociocultural perspective of learning, student development emerges more completely through engagement with the communal activities and values that constitute professional practices rather than…

Purpose: In the context of falling demand for higher education and, in particular, doctoral studies, it is important to understand how to attract new students. The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of the decision-making process the PhD students of Baltic universities followed when choosing whether to continue their education at…

This study investigated the theoretical frameworks used to frame research on family-school partnerships over a five-year period. Although many researchers have described their theoretical approaches, little has been written about the diversity of frameworks used and how they are applied. Coders analyzed 215 journal articles published from 2007 to…

Developing an identity as a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) researcher is associated with tensions of expanding on one's disciplinary identity and often traversing the liminal space between disciplines that result in a newfound perception of professional self. This study explores the differences that emerged in SoTL identity formation…