This case study presents a blended learning study program offered as a continuing education certificate of advanced studies for post-secondary educators and training professionals in the private, non-governmental, and public sectors. This accredited certificate program is unique in that it allows participants to propose and develop their own…

An experiment based on the sublimation of a solid was introduced in the undergraduate Transport Phenomena course. The experiment required the students to devise their own apparatus and measurement techniques. The theoretical basis, assignment of the experiment, experimental results, and student/instructor observations are described in this paper.…

Quick and real-time plotting equations using the Winplot software can be employed to create accurate hybrid atomic orbitals without complicated scripting. Performing this task on their own, students can more easily understand and remember hybrid atomic orbitals, in terms of shape and orientation.

Let's face it. Traditional lectures do not consistently capture our students' attention, especially when they are PowerPoint-driven and lack student/instructor interaction. Most of us have had the unfortunate feeling that our students were not fully engaged in our lectures, despite hours of preparation on our part. This sense of "wasted"…

The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding of how students listen and attend to multiple solutions proposed by their classmates during the activity of comparison. This study examines ten consecutive lessons in each of the two eighth-grade classrooms in Tokyo that are organized in the style of "structured problem solving".…

This paper describes a student designed experiment using titrations involving conductivity measurements to identify unknown acids as being either HCl or H[subscript 2]SO[subscript 4], and to determine the concentrations of the acids, thereby improving the utility of standard acid-base titrations. Using an inquiry context, students gain experience…

The physiology of breath holding is complex, and voluntary breath-hold duration is affected by many factors, including practice, psychology, respiratory chemoreflexes, and lung stretch. In this activity, we outline a number of simple laboratory activities or classroom demonstrations that illustrate the complexity of the integrative physiology…

This article describes an innovation called the Integrative Business Experience (IBE) that links a set of required core business courses to an entrepreneurial practicum course in which two things occur. One is that students are concurrently enrolled in the required core business courses and a practicum course while they create a start-up business…

The problem of effective learning in college classrooms, especially in a large lecture setting, has been a topic of discussion for a considerable span of time. Most efforts to improve learning incorporate various forms of student-active learning, such as in-class investigations or problems, group discussions, collaborative examinations and…

The study we have carried out aims to characterize 15-to 16-year-old students' learning progressions throughout the implementation of a teaching-learning sequence on the acoustic properties of materials. Our purpose is to better understand students' modeling processes about this topic and to identify how the instructional design and actual…

This inquiry-based experiment is designed for organic or biochemistry undergraduate students to deduce the identity of phospholipids extracted from chicken eggs and dietary supplements. This is achieved using thin-layer chromatography (TLC) data, a series of guided questions of increasing complexity, and provided relative retention factor (Rf)…

The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework from the National Council for Social Studies (NCSS) features an inquiry approach to teaching K-12 social studies in which social studies standards are organized into an "inquiry arc." Inquiry in elementary economics is often underused in practice (Laney 2001). This study describes how a…

This paper reports on an introductory world regional geography course with a role-playing exercise. The goal was to situate students in a form of popular geopolitics that engaged them viscerally with positionality and othering. Students were assigned different positionalities in a liminal active learning environment within a context of fear of…

This study explored secondary agriculture education as practiced by four teachers and sought to examine and describe how they interpreted and practiced the Biological Science Applications in Agriculture (BSAA) curriculum. The following questions were examined: (a) What does BSAA teaching look like in practice? (b) How do teachers perceive their…

Nowadays, there is a consensus that inquiry-based learning contributes to developing students' scientific literacy in schools. Inquiry-based teaching strategies are promoted for the development (among others) of the cognitive processes that cultivate problem solving (PS) competence. The build up of PS competence is a central objective for most…