Exemplary science instructors use inquiry to tailor content to student's learning needs; traditional textbooks treat science as a set of facts and a rigid curriculum. Publishers now allow instructors to compile pieces of published and/or self-authored text to make custom textbooks. This brings numerous advantages, including the ability to produce…

We draw on the philosophical works of Aristotle, Gadamer, Arendt, and Sockett to argue for a return to the rough ground of reason and deliberation in teaching. We offer a conceptualization of teaching and teacher development within a framework that honors the technical and practical nature of knowledge, experience, and practice. Through examples…

At the end of primary school all children more of less know what a percentage is, but yet they often struggle with percentage problems. This article describes a study in which students of 13 and 14 years old were given a written test with percentage problems and a week later were interviewed about the way they solved some of these problems. In a…

Nowadays, there is a need in science education to consider scientific research and its applications alongside ethical consensus. Even though classroom debates of value issues have been demonstrated to significantly contribute to the raising of social consciousness and awareness, research shows that neither academics in higher education nor…

The paper examines how the use of hybrid models--that consist of the interacting continuous and discrete processes--may assist in teaching system thinking. We report an experiment in which undergraduate students were asked to choose between a hybrid and a continuous solution for a number of control problems. A correlation has been found between…

The challenges of learning statistics, particularly distributions and their characteristics, can be potentially monumental for vision impaired and blind students. The authors provide some practical advice for teaching these students.

A few years ago, the author saw a video of a pop concert. It looked just like concerts of his youth: a well-lit stage amid a darkened crowd flecked with small wavering lights. He laughed when he realized, however, that the swaying glow was coming not from cigarette lighters but from LCD screens. This juxtaposition of old flames and new beacons…

This study aims to evaluate and analyze strategies, proposals, and ICT tools to promote a paradigm shift in educational supervision that enhances the schools of this century involved not only in teaching-face learning, but e-learning and blended learning. Traditional models of educational supervision do not guarantee adequate supervision of the…

Although most business students participate in team-based projects during undergraduate or graduate course work, the team experience does not always teach team skills or capture the team members' potential: Students complete the task at hand but the explicit process of becoming a team is often not learned. Drawing from organizational learning…

Internationally there is concern that many science teachers do not address socioscientific issues (SSI) in their classrooms, particularly those that are controversial. However with increasingly complex, science-based dilemmas being presented to society, such as cloning, genetic screening, alternative fuels, reproductive technologies and…

In this article, the author traces the history of the five-paragraph theme and the views about it, along with arguing for its elimination in writing instruction in favor of problem-based, "rich-task" writing experiences for students. She intends to bring together various voices on theme writing across time along with some key bits of the history…

This paper describes the development of a peer review of teaching model for the Faculty of Health at the University of Newcastle, Australia. The process involved using the nominal group technique to engage Faculty academic staff to consider seven key decision points that informed the development of the peer review of teaching model. Use of the…

In this article, the author describes the Launch-Explore-Summarize teaching model which provides a way to structure how students participated in tasks. Shifting the structure of lessons helped the author foster her desired mathematical environment. This approach to teaching was different for her in that it recommended giving students very little…

The Model My Watershed (MMW) application, and associated curricula, provides students with meaningful opportunities to connect conceptual understanding of watersheds to real-world decision making. The application uses an authentic hydrologic model, TR-55 (developed by the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service), and real data applied in…

Objectives: Inguinal canal anatomy and hernia repair is difficult for medical students and surgical residents to comprehend. Methods: Using low-cost material, a 3-dimensional inexpensive model of the inguinal canal was created to allow students to learn anatomical details and landmarks and to perform their own simulated hernia repair. In order to…