An important pre-condition to diversifying the workforce of land-grant extension services is access to qualified ethnic minority individuals with an awareness and interest in pursuing extension careers. This paper highlights an example of collaboration between the K-State Research and Extension office and an educational research program at Kansas…

This article offers two novel tools for teaching political science methodology and research design. The first is a comprehensive framework for helping students conceptualize a research project in political science. The second is a reformulation of the dominant conceptualization of process-tracing tests. Building on Collier's use of Sherlock Holmes…

Traditional laboratory courses involve students following detailed weekly experimental procedures, culminating in either a laboratory report or handout at the end of each experiment. While this setup teaches basic laboratory skills, it usually does not encourage students to think critically or independently. Therefore, many laboratory instructors…

This teaching note describes the design and implementation of an undergraduate research team project to conduct a tent census. Previous studies highlight the importance of real-world research as a part of sociology curriculum. Tents, as a visible sign of homelessness, represent one such contemporary social problem. Our undergraduate research team…

The majority of studies on telecollaboration for educational purposes focus on language-related aspects. Therefore, a qualitative explorative research project was set up at the RuhrUniversity Bochum, Germany, dealing with telecollaboration from the perspective of a non-language discipline; it is based on the approach of transferring…

Students love to hate group projects. Not surprisingly, one of the most ubiquitous complaints about college on social media often centers on group projects. Despite the seemingly deep-rooted distaste for group projects, instructors and employers alike agree that students must be equipped with the skills of communication, teamwork, and critical…

How do districts know if the resources they have allocated to support professional learning in their school district are actually improving the quality of teaching and impacting student performance? In an increasingly challenging financial environment, this is important to know. In this article, a Chicago-area district facing a budget deficit…

The department of business administration of Münster University of Applied Sciences (MUAS) in Germany has a long tradition in realising practice-oriented research projects in cooperation with industry. The objective of these cooperative projects is to offer students real-life experiences and to make the theoretical know-how of university lectures…

Two mural projects in Brunei offer insight into the specific and universal aspects of public art education and community art making. This article describes how the author used his initiative and experience as a muralist to plan and implement two community art research projects in Bandar Seri Begwan, the capital of Brunei Darussalam. A premise of…

Today's employers seek high levels of creativity, communication, and critical thinking, which are considered essential skills in the workplace. Engaging undergraduate students in critical thinking is especially challenging in introductory courses. The advent of YouTube, inexpensive video cameras, and easy-to-use video editors provides…

"We really need to get the government involved," said one student, holding his graph up to USDA scientist Steve Seefeldt. Dr. Steve studies methods to control "invasive" plants, plants that have been introduced to an area by humans and have potential to spread rapidly and negatively affect ecosystems. The first grader and his…

We describe an interactive collaborative environmental education project that makes advanced laboratory facilities at Brookhaven National Laboratory accessible for one-year or multi-year science projects for the high school level. Cyber-enabled Environmental Science (CEES) utilizes web conferencing software to bring multi-disciplinary,…

Joan Garfield reflects on cooperative learning, 20 years after publishing an article on this topic in the inaugural issue of "Journal of Statistics Education" ("JSE") (Garfield 1993). Here, she writes that as she re-read the article, she realized that she still agrees with most of what she originally wrote regarding the use of…

This article proposes facilitation of active learning in methods courses using collaborative survey research projects. Students form groups in which they develop and administer questionnaires that explore public attitudes and behaviors. Each step requires they apply key concepts toward completion of the project. Collaborative research project…

RefWorks is ideally suited for undergraduate students with team-based research projects as part of their course assessment. The Dorothy Hill Physical Sciences and Engineering Library at the University of Queensland taught students from three engineering courses how to use RefWorks to manage project references and to create team-based…