Inter- and intra-district public school choice, vouchers, tuition tax credits and other forms of school choice have been advocated for decades, in large part on grounds that the market forces engendered will improve public education. There are many studies of school choice policies and programs and a large theoretical literature on school choice,…

Student teaching in New York City on September 11, 2001, forced the author to scrap her carefully planned lessons. Instead, she designed a unit to address the urgent needs of the ninth graders in her care. In this article, the author describes the poetry unit she designed to help students deal with the grieving process and allow them a way to talk…

This paper outlines the architecture for an online assessment management system implemented at the University of Southern Queensland. The system assists teams of academics in the management and marking of electronically submitted student assignments in large-scale classes. The system designed to provide a flexible yet structured method for…

In this article, the author relates her experiences teaching a history course titled "Introduction to the Modern World." She relates how some of her colleagues immediately began providing her with unsolicited warnings regarding the difficulty of engaging students in world history and the impossibility of covering "500 years of the whole world" in…

Teaching communication to MBAs often involves focusing on corporate strategic discourse when student projects are intended to help companies move to a more advanced stage of development. This focus on corporate strategy--the language and concepts that concern the mission and direction that an organization should adopt--requires, in turn, that…

Assignments that combine case studies with applied research can work for presentations as well as for written reports. One such assignment that has proven to be successful both in the author's classes and later in the students' professional lives is based on (1) incorporating banking concepts and encouraging their use in presentations; (2)…

This study reviews allied literature and specific teacher educator behaviors that promote preservice teachers' development of a personalized, research-based elementary science teaching rationale (STR). Declaring absolutes is not the goal of the rationale. Rather, the goal is to initiate, among preservice teachers, the lifelong professional…

Moral feeling, moral thinking and moral acting are aspects in Moral Education for Malaysian schools. Students are encouraged to practice what they learn within and outside the boundaries of the class room. In the year 2000, there were shift in assessing teaching and learning of Moral Education in which equal weightage were given to the…

Research has documented that collaborative learning groups improve student learning and increase the likelihood that students will have positive attitudes about both the subject matter and their peers. However, researchers know much less about how collaborative learning groups may influence student behavior and the extent to which their utility…

As experts on the nature and needs of young children, early childhood educators are in prime positions to advocate for the health and well-being of young children. Advocacy can take the form of personal, public, or private-sector endeavors. Personal advocacy is usually informal and involves educating others on an issue about early childhood…

Writing can be a powerful tool for learning biology. Writing assignments in biology could help students personalize and understand the biology knowledge they are studying. In this article, the authors present the "Botanical Sense of Place" (BSP), a convenient and easy-to-use writing template that they developed to elicit and probe students' prior…

Group work is a widely used learning approach in higher education where it is seen as encouraging the development of collaborative skills and attitudes while producing an assessable product. Group assignments can, however, create dilemmas and tensions for both staff and students. Students often seek academic intervention in the form of support and…

The authors detail the design, implementation and evaluation of an eConference entitled "Biohorizons," using a presage-process-product model to describe the development of an eLearning community. Biohorizons was a summative learning and assessment task aiming to introduce large classes of first-year Human Biology students to the practices of…

This study compared student learning outcomes and student perceptions of and satisfaction with the learning process between two sections of the same class--a web-based section and a traditional face-to-face (f2f) section. Using a quasi-experimental design, students were randomly assigned to the two course sections. Group equivalency was…

Richard Gambino's "Blood of My Blood" was of help to a writing instructor coming to terms with the role that her Italian ethnicity played in her life and education. Gambino's understanding of the inner tensions experienced by an individual who must negotiate between two cultures has helped the instructor in teaching working-class and…