Critical thinking is a common and important learning outcome in college curricula. Case-based and problem-based learning can be used to assess and foster critical thinking skills. HNF 250--Contemporary Issues in Human Nutrition is a critical thinking course developed during the redesign of a nutritional sciences major program. Course assignments…

Marcia Gentry personified a life well-lived. In this tribute to her work and legacy, her early ideas are highlighted. The author describes her professional experiences with Marcia during the years when Marcia was a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut. Recalling her initial motivation for a more inclusive form of identification of…

Ample research has identified several features of a learning experience likely to enhance student learning, including collaboration, open-ended exploration, and problem-based learning in real-life scenarios. Missing is a model of how instructors might combine these elements into a single project that works flexibly across disciplines and…

An increasing number of introductory physics courses are seeking to incorporate "authentic practices," and a large area of focus in this trend is the incorporation of computational problems into the curriculum. These problems offer students an opportunity to engage with the programming practices and numerical problem-solving methods used…

In this paper we examine how facilitators' prior experiences as mathematics teachers frame their work when facilitating a practice-based professional development (PD) for the first time. We focus on the experiences of a novice facilitator of StoryCircles, a professional learning process in which teachers collectively script and visualize a…

This paper provides insights into an initiative that offers graduate and professional students from across the University of Michigan the opportunity to participate in multi-disciplinary, problem-based classes that foster creative thinking, teamwork, and development of transferrable skills. The paper describes how, in order to improve student…

Educational approaches in structural engineering have focused on classical methods for solving problems with manual calculations through assignments, quizzes, and exams. The use of computational software to apply the learned knowledge has been ignored for decades. This paper describes an educational approach to tackle the lack of applicable…

Supporters of project-based learning (PBL) argue that outcomes from the model include better performance in academic (Bell, 2010; Thomas, 2000) and non-academic outcomes (Saunders-Steward, Gyles, & Shore, 2010). The New Tech Network (NTN) is a school improvement network that provides training and development for high school faculty who commit…

Physiology instructors often are faced with the challenge of providing informative and educationally stimulating laboratories while trying to design them in such a way that encourages students to be actively involved in their own learning. With many laboratory experiments designed with simplicity and efficiency as the primary focus, it is…