Current educational systems are making shifts from teacher-centered to learner-centered environments. This shift creates space for more involvement from students in their own instructional and assessment processes that sets them up for success in a method that allows them control of their achievement. Teachers have to assess and reflect on their…

The focus of this article is on the development of expertise in interpreting literature within English Language Arts (ELA). Experts and novices differ significantly in how they approach problems and acquire information, with experts demonstrating more sophisticated pattern recognition, nuances, and conceptual understandings and approaches than…

A concept-heavy engineering module was offered to introduce the experience of solving full-scale real-world energy-related engineering problems within a classroom environment and prepare students to be professionally ready for the industry. The widely practiced hybrid problem-based learning (h-PBL) pedagogical approach was adopted for the first 2…

Learning progressions have become increasingly prevalent in mathematics education as they offer a fine-grain map of possible learning pathways a child may take within a particular domain. However, there is an opportunity to build upon this research in ways that consider learning from multiple perspectives. Many current forms of learning…

This paper aims to reveal the potential of inferentialism, an emerging philosophy in mathematics education, to extend contemporary constructivist research regarding conceptual development. Going against the traditional view of a notion as the name of a corresponding concept and a constructivist way of naming second-order models, we provide a new…

Beginning a mathematics lesson involving a challenging task with a carefully chosen preliminary experience is an effective means of activating student cognition. In this article, the authors highlight a variety of preliminary experiences, each with a different structure and form, all designed to support students to more successfully engage with…

We developed a remote lab experience where freshmen grew and analyzed the activity of sourdough starters as a means of engaging with chemical engineering concepts. This six-week hands-on activity was targeted due to its low-cost, non-hazardous materials, and ability to be conducted safely in a non-laboratory setting. By designing the lab to be…

Student engagement is a growing challenge within higher education, especially as technology continues to evolve and competition for attention rises. As a business discipline, many marketing students struggle to connect with the theory presented in the classroom and seek interactive, experiential learning opportunities. The authors created the…

In this reflection of teaching, we describe a series of activities that introduce the Taylor series through dynamic visual representations with explicit connections to students' prior learning. Over the past several decades, educators have noted that curricular materials tend to present the Taylor series in a way that students often interpret as…

The authors share an online collaborative problem-solving activity that integrates support for students' developing conceptual understanding, focused engagement, and positive feelings of agency and identity.

Students often fail to utilize what they know about one topic (e.g., hemodynamics) when attempting to master another topic involving a similar phenomenon (e.g., airflow in airways). What accounts for this difficulty that students have? And how can students be assisted in doing a better job of applying what they already know to new topics? The…

This article presents how Problem- and Project-Based Learning (PBL) in engineering education can exploit the theoretical framework of the Space-Time (ST)-Continuum, according to which educational contexts can be classified in terms of the tightness vs. looseness of the relevant conceptual space S and available time T. By crossing these two…

This article describes students learning to build their own numbering system by recognizing and identifying patterns with interlocking cubes in different place values. The students used the Egyptian hieroglyphic numeral system in conjunction with this activity to connect learning in other subjects. Students used prior knowledge of place value to…

Professional identity development of students is an often discussed but never resolved issue in higher education. To facilitate a shift toward developing students' professional identity, we propose a pedagogical model where students are tasked with developing and providing instruction to their classmates during a 75-minute teaching session.…

We introduce learning modules in cryptography that can be crafted to motivate many abstract mathematical ideas, and we illustrate with a sample module. These modules can be used in a variety of ways, such as the core for a cryptography course or as motivating topics in other courses such as abstract and linear algebra or number theory.