This column presents ideas and techniques to enhance your science teaching. This month's issue shares information about a unit promoting scientific literacy and the engineering design process. The integration of engineering with scientific practices in K-12 education can promote creativity, hands-on learning, and an improvement in students'…

In this article Sarita Cargas suggests that getting honors students used to analyzing controversies will contribute to their developing a disposition toward critical thinking. She goes on to say that the value of teaching critical-thinking skills complements the movement of many honors programs toward teaching more than just disciplinary content.…

Continued agricultural productivity hinges on understanding how to manage soil resources. A 2-week undergraduate introductory-level module: "A Growing Concern: Sustaining Soil Resources Through Local Decision Making" was collaboratively developed through the InTeGrate Project. InTeGrate modules and courses engage students in grand…

Using a qualitative research methodology, we interviewed 20 Southeast Asian undergraduate students from Malaysia and Indonesia attending universities in northern Jordan to identify any adjustment problems they may have been facing. These international students experienced pressure to succeed from their sponsoring agencies and families, a very…

The author in this paper critically reviews recent literature on international student language and adjustment to Western Anglophone universities. Two streams of research are discussed: the problem-solving approach guided largely by positivist epistemologies and quantitative methodologies contrasted to the post-structuralist language and identity…

This paper presents the findings of a small-scale study that investigated the issues and challenges of teaching and learning about quantitative reasoning (QR) within a project-based learning (PjBL) context. Students and teachers were surveyed and interviewed about their experiences of learning and teaching QR in that context in contrast to…

This paper reports on the results of a study investigating the potential to embed Informal Statistical Inference in statistical investigations, using TinkerPlots, for assisting 8th grade students' informal inferential reasoning to emerge, particularly their articulations of uncertainty. Data collection included students' written work on a…

How do schools maintain momentum with change and enter new cycles of growth when they are attempting to do things differently? This article draws on a two-year evaluation of the "Positive Behaviour for Learning School-Wide" initiative to identify key factors that enabled schools to engage in a long-term and iterative change process.…

Whilst personalization offers the promise of more choice and control and wider participation in the community, the reality in the United Kingdom has been hampered by local council cuts and a decline in formal services. This has left many people with intellectual disabilities feeling dislocated from collective forms of support (Needham, 2015). What…

In 2013 Hedmark University College conducted a research project where students from a game development project/study program developed and tested a Pervasive Game for learning as part of a class in System Thinking. The overall game goal was to teach Sustainability through System Thinking, and to give the students a real world experience with their…

This study shows how separate and combined contextual and conceptual problem rewording can positively influence student performance in solving mathematical word problems. Participants included 80 seventh-grade Iranian students randomly assigned in groups of 20 to three experimental groups involving three types of rewording and a control group. All…

We are now living in an era of big data. From the perspective of data analysis of classroom questioning, the paper chooses three districts in City B that have significant differences. These are educationally developed District D, less developed District F, and developing District M. The study uses the stratified sampling method to choose from…

This study used Focus Group to analyze user requirements for user interface so as to understand what capabilities of the Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) Instructional Platform were expected by users. After 12 focus group interviews, the following four functions had been identified as essential to the CPS Instructional Platform: CPS…

Successful completion of a university degree is a complex matter. Based on considerations regarding the demands of acquiring a university degree, the aim of this paper was to investigate the utility of complex problem-solving (CPS) skills in the prediction of objective and subjective university success (SUS). The key finding of this study was that…

For decades, researchers have asserted that K-12 teachers should embed reading comprehension instruction within each academic discipline, including "technical subjects" such as engineering. Recently, this assertion has become a source of controversy among researchers and practitioners who believe that time spent on teaching reading…