Research has demonstrated a correlation between lecture attendance and students' academic achievement. However, students may not attend lectures for a variety of reasons. The provision of lecture recordings online can also negatively impact lecture attendance and student achievement. These facts implore us to be courageous and explore new…

The PowerPoint-assisted lecture (slide-lecture) is a common lecturing approach in higher education, in spite of much criticism of its use. Its popularity is facilitated by its affordances for multimodal instructional design, e.g. text with images and speech. Little is known about the integration of different semiotic modalities within the…

Incivility has been reported as having an adverse impact on student learning, faculty staff retention and student commitment within Higher Education. As such this behaviour has the potential to reduce student achievement and could have a financial impact. The aim of this research was to examine the impact of teaching context (lecture versus…

In the past 20 years, the landscape of Higher Education in the United Kingdom has changed considerably. With the prospect of tuition fees spiralling above £9,000 per year, per student, it is important to explore the impact this has upon the student experience. In spite of the vast financial investment current students make towards their education,…

This article traces and critically analyses a personal journey in search of effective ways to promote exemplary questioning on the part of students. The article is in many ways a polemic rather than a scientific study, which emerges as much from the 1970s and the writings of Carl Rogers as from the second decade of the twenty-first century with…

The value and importance of lectures in higher education is part of a modern education discourse worldwide. This study aims to estimate the importance of lectures for prospective teachers of kindergarten, preschool and early primary school. We analysed academic achievements of prospective teachers who had either mandatorily or voluntarily attended…

Drawing on the experience of training graduate students and researchers in qualitative and mixed-methods analysis since the mid-1990s, the authors reflect on the evolution of a multidisciplinary graduate course developed in a Canadian university since 2007. The hands-on/hands-off course design based on the use of NVivo was developed in parallel…

We investigated how high-performers and low-performers differ with regard to motivation and engagement in a university-level, large-format general education geography course. One hundred and ten students participated in the study. A self-report measure was administered three times (at the beginning, middle and end of the semester). Performance…

Academic boredom usually contributes adversely towards student engagement and performance across a diverse range of settings including universities. The formal study of academic boredom in higher education remains, however, a relatively underdeveloped field and one surprisingly neglected in the UK. Rooted in Control-Value Theory, details of a…

This article explores a teaching approach that aims to engage learners more fully in the deep learning process that is characterised by the development of critical thinking skills. The concept of critical thinking skills is reconsidered in the context of the need to shift focus away from teaching teachers about learning to teaching students about…

This paper examines the career paths of principals and senior managers in the Scottish Further Education Sector. The research is set within a discourse of tension and polarization between lecturing staff and their managers who, it has been argued, are perceived to have somewhat different ideological values (Elliot, 1996; Randle & Brady, 1997).…