U.S. colleges and universities have been demonstrably ineffective at facilitating scholarship among their students. To become effective, psychological science suggests institutions must tap students' intrinsic motivations and address their core values from Day 1 through graduation. This article describes a science-based, integrated set of…

A course on ethics and history of technology, taught to 1886 first-year engineering students of 14 engineering departments was redesigned using Self-Determination Theory (SDT) by adapting many course elements at the same time. We applied the situational level of Vallerand's hierarchical model, analysing how the elements of this ethics and history…

The constructive alignment (CA) of university teaching has received considerable attention from a policy-making perspective, but much less so from a student perspective. Against this background, we explored the relationships between CA and student motivation, and between CA and perceived learning demands. Fifty-six students from two second-year…

The authors' purpose is to describe a grading system that reasonably assesses student performance relative to course goals while at the same time provides interim feedback that is accurate, facilitates learning and motivates students. This method has been effectively used in several iterations of a finance course. The authors explain how to design…

One of the most illuminating finds in Barbara E. Walvoord's "Teaching and Learning in College Introductory Religion Courses" (2008) is what she calls "the great divide," a mismatch between instructors' goals for their courses, which are academic, and the students' reasons for taking them, which relate to their personal…

This study was an attempt to evaluate practicum courses at Farhangian University. Since practicum is a significant component of teacher education which links theory to practice and prepares student-teachers for their work, this study was intended to explore the extent to which (1) the practicum objectives stated in the 'Curriculum Document of…

While enacting innovative learner-centered practices has been reported to instigate, at least initially, student negative responses in diverse contexts, studies in translation education adhering to teaching approaches informed by social-constructivism have paid no great attention to student resistance, as one potential threatening factor, in…

This article reports on an action research project on improving a functional programming course by moving toward a practical and flexible study environment--flipped and blended classroom. Teaching the topic of functional programming was found to be troublesome using a traditional lectured course format. The need to increase students' amount of…

This study evaluated syllabi (N = 87) from introductory advertising and public relations courses to examine to what extent and how stated course goals and assignments signal the overall learning orientation of a course and which type of learning orientation--mastery or performance--was most common. Mastery orientations emphasize intrinsic rewards,…