This article examines the development of a bespoke primary source literacy module for the study of childhood in Ireland. The BA (Children's Studies) at National University of Ireland Galway is a unique interdisciplinary degree that equips students with a theoretical and practical understanding of the lives of children and childhood today. The…

The American Sociological Association has produced a wide range of reports and materials addressing curricular best practices. Collectively, those materials are an invaluable resource for guiding revisions of the sociology major, but they do not address processes for implementing such revisions. In this conversation piece, we describe the steps by…

Understanding students' perspectives on the foreign language (FL) curriculum could be considered as a vital step in curriculum design and lesson planning. This study drew on data provided by a single open question survey to investigate the perspective of Dutch secondary school students (N = 635) from 15 different schools with regard to the…

The purpose of this study was twofold. First, it aimed to determine whether the application of backward design model has any significant effect on improving the writing ability of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Second, the study sought to evaluate the superiority of backward design to conventional forward models in the improvement of the…

Visual representations are a familiar element of daily life and particularly beneficial as illustrations in science textbooks. In this case, learners draw on human dimensions such as cognitive style (CS) and prior knowledge (PK) when engaging in visual thinking. This study aimed to compare and explore the relationships among the format aspect…

This article examines why universities need either happiness education or religion education. To discuss this study systematically, four research questions are stated. First, what are the concepts of religion and happiness? Second, what is the relation between religion and happiness? Third, why do universities need happiness education or religion…

Most academics learn how to write research articles informally and implicitly through exposure in academia. This experience with a pilot English for Academic Purposes course suggests that drawing attention to linguistic features can greatly improve the writing of both early career and experienced researchers. ["ESP News" is published by…

The paper argues that powerful regional knowledge is necessary and possible and that there are historical precedents supporting these claims. Regional knowledge is being used in a double sense: the first Bernsteinian, the second in relation to knowledge generated outside the academy. Both are important if the debate is not to be confined solely to…

The challenge of reading across disciplines is often not a matter of word recognition or general comprehension instruction; it is a matter of understanding how ideas are represented in the language and conventions of that discipline. In this article we describe a strategy for foregrounding the disciplines in the design and implementation of…

Herein, we describe an intensive, week-long course design institute (CDI) designed to introduce participants to the scholarly and evidence-driven process of learning-focused course design. Impact of this intervention is demonstrated using a multifaceted approach: (a) post-CDI satisfaction and perception surveys, (b) pre-/post-CDI surveys probing…

Academic institutions increasingly have adopted the online platform due to its low delivery cost and ease of scalability to large numbers of students. The pressure to increase enrollment numbers without enhancements to online course design have created the problem of lower retention and completion rates which can effect institutional funding. The…

New educational curricula are regularly put into practice worldwide; and the issues related to curriculum design are frequently discussed from a pedagogical perspective. However, the processes involved in preparing a statewide English as a foreign language (EFL) curriculum are rarely elaborated from an inside view. As the experiences of program…

This article reviews and evaluates the academic integrity research conducted in Australasia over a 30-year period from 1990-2020. It presents an analysis of studies on academic integrity including those on contract cheating as an increasing area of concern in higher education. The authors divide the research according to the diverse…

Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) is an international standard to measure learners' language abilities on a six-point scale, A1 for beginners up to C2 for those who have mastered a language. this study attempted to examine the implementation of the CEFR policy in learning Arabic in Indonesia at al levels, beginning form curriculum…

Grammatical compression and implicitness have been proven as characteristics of academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010, 2016), but they are an underexplored area of research particularly in academic ESL (English as a second language) writing. In this study, we explored the dependent phrases that most and least characterize academic ESL writing…