Presents a demonstration for teaching psychology students to be wary of pseudoscientific treatment methods. Offers instructions for presenting the demonstration. Shows how a patently ridiculous treatment can be shown effective, in the same way that a fad treatment can sometimes appear valuable. Concludes that students learned from and enjoy the…

To enhance student interest in research methods, tests and measurement, and statistics classes, we describe how teachers may use resources from economic psychology to illustrate key concepts in these courses. Because of their applied nature and relevance to student experiences, topics covered by these resources may capture student attention and…

When English instructors functioning simultaneously as researchers study the reading and writing processes of their own students, it is important that they fully describe the context within which the study takes place and the effect that the dual instructional/research environment has on the participants, who are, similarly, functioning as both…

Numerous reports over recent years emphasise the importance of teamwork training in undergraduate programs in environment education at tertiary level. This paper describes a project undertaken by a team of final year undergraduate environment students from four faculties at RMIT University in Australia working on a multi-disciplinary environment…

The assessment literature frequently ignores the quandary of the department resistant to assessment in its discussion of implementing departmental plans and instead focuses on idealized implementation processes. The approach articulated in this article builds on the assessment literature, generating the hypothesis that a grassroots approach to…

The Learning in Science Project (1979-1981) studied the problems and difficulties of learning science at the 10-14 year old level in New Zealand to provide insights into the world of the science learner and provide an alternative perspective of the science classroom to that currently held by teachers and others. This paper offers practical…

Summaries of the Danish internal reports of the essay studies, the introspection studies, and the literary analyses that are part of the larger interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project concerning the collective versus the individual nature of the response to literature are presented in this report. Various sections of the five papers…

A detailed description of a three-year project investigating the kinds of writing produced by Australian students in grades 10 through 12 is provided in this report. The various sections of the report describe the aims, objectives, and rationale for the project; some of its major assumptions and influences; a description of the student and teacher…

Three topics are discussed: (1) the meaning of feminist research; (2) what can be learned about research practices from feminist efforts to create empowering research designs; and (3) how postmodernism presents challenges to feminist empirical work. Feminist research puts the social construction of gender at the center of one's inquiry in order to…

Describes an undergraduate teaching assistant (TA) program in which the undergraduates engage in the complementary activities of course preparation, course instruction, and one-on-one tutorial assistance. Both students enrolled in an introductory methodology course and the undergraduates serving as TAs indicated that they viewed the experience…

A learning object is a small, stand-alone, mediated content resource that can be reused in multiple instructional contexts. In this article, we describe our approach to design, develop, and validate Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) compliant learning objects for undergraduate computer science education. We discuss the advantages of…

Describes a six-week project culminating in a student-designed exit survey for graduating seniors. Exit surveys assess a department's strengths and weaknesses in curricula, instruction, and advising. Discusses the students' design and implementation of the survey. Students felt that the project enhanced their critical thinking and research skills.…

This study examined the differential effects of a course-based treatment (i.e., students' direct application of reading strategies to their own college texts) versus a content-based treatment (i.e., student application of reading strategies to texts provided in the reading class) on various measures of student achievement and psychological…

Describes a qualitative action research study that investigated the effectiveness of an assignment for tenth graders that required primary research methods and an essay. Topics include authentic research; constructivist theory of learning; performance-based assessment; student journals; peer editing; teacher-librarian collaboration; and student…

The purpose of this project was to investigate, in an informal and exploratory manner, the reactions of middle school students to unfamiliar symbols used as computer screen icons. The project focused on discovering a means to address the following issues: (1) the appearance of buttons containing text compared to those with graphics; (2) the…