In August 2010, the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) received a grant of more than $25 million from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) program for a five-year study to validate its Leadership Assistance for Science Education Reform (LASER) model in three very diverse regions of the United States: rural North…

Decreasing motivation in science classes is often reported in many countries. Georgia, one of the post Soviet countries, has overcome the highly centralised educational system and nowadays implements a new national educational reform. National reforms demand more student-active and inquiry-based learning. Many Georgian teachers aren't ready for…

The overall aim of this two-year study is to understand effective practice and lessons learned from approaches to curriculum design and employer engagement by University Technical Colleges (UTCs). Researchers used a case-study methodology supplemented with management information and a survey of UTC students' views. Key findings include: (1)…

What if you could challenge your second graders to design an outdoor STEM classroom with a butterfly garden, birdbath, and sundial? With this volume in the "STEM Road Map Curriculum Series," you can! "Investigating Environmental Changes" outlines a journey that will steer your students toward authentic problem solving while…

In this article, we present our findings regarding promoting group drawing activities in order to facilitate the learning of systemic aspects of projects. We discuss the approach we used to engage the students and foster learning in our classes. We used group drawing activities in two project management undergraduate courses. The courses, which…

This article describes how second-grade students' literacy learning was enhanced as they used their developing knowledge of nonfiction in an integrated English language arts/science unit toward the creation of multimodal nonfiction science books. After explaining the Common Core State Standards that guided the unit, the author outlines the…

Upper-secondary school students must prepare for adult life, which--among others--entails acquiring relevant skills and discovering their own potential. Efforts at European and national levels have been made to ensure that students gain the competences, the so-called key competences, which facilitate functioning in the modern world. However, in…

The purpose of this study was to explore to what extent the in-service chemistry teachers improved their PCK after attending the training program at the Faculty of Education. The research questions were: (1) How do in-service teachers' personal perceptions about the teaching/learning process change after attending the training course at the…

This article reports on phenomenographic research which explored the qualitative differences in post-secondary students' accounts of their networked learning experiences. Data was generated using semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of participants. Phenomenographic analysis led to a configuration of variation in students' accounts…

In 2000 several STEM faculty at Bethel College in Kansas designed and began offering a one-week intensive residential summer research experience for high school students--the Bethel College Summer Science Institute. The core idea underlying the design was to motivate students through the excitement of discovery. This event has been offered…

With graduate employability being high on many universities' agendas, it becomes vital that a curriculum delivers not only subject knowledge but also the opportunity for students to develop and enhance industry-specific skills. This paper is concerned with how a work-based project can support skill development and considers the views of students…

This paper analyses teachers' engagement with collaborative and open educational practices to develop their pedagogical expertise in the field of modern language (ML) learning and specific learning difficulties (SpLD). The study analyses the findings of a staff development initiative at the Department of Languages, Open University, UK, in 2013,…

The study identifies the relationships between active learning, student teachers' self-regulated learning and professional competences. Further, the aim is to investigate how active learning promotes professional competences of student teachers with different self-regulation profiles. Responses from 422 student teachers to an electronic survey…

Increasing faculty use of active-learning (AL) pedagogies in college classrooms is a persistent challenge in biology education. A large research-intensive university implemented changes to its biology majors' two-course introductory sequence as outlined by the "Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education" final report. One goal…

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of using online discussion forums (ODFs) on students' learning, particularly on their achievement. In order to achieve this, a quasi-experimental design was implemented during one academic semester at one of the leading universities in Saudi Arabia. The sample of this study involved undergraduate…