Given that social work research courses are typically built on modernist principles of teaching and content, it is not surprising that the majority of social work students dread these courses. Few attempts have been made to better align the modernist content of quantitative research with the postmodern philosophy and values inherent in current…

Focus groups were convened in 2005 and 2013 as the first step in successive MPA curriculum review and revision processes. Although the criteria for selecting participants and the questions posed to the groups were similar, the focus groups generated dramatically different perspectives regarding the challenges confronting administrators. An…

This paper examines the challenge of teaching statistical research methods in three master's degree programs at a private university based in Washington, DC. We, as three professors teaching at this university, discuss the way we employ innovative approaches to deal with this challenge. We ground our discussion within the theoretical framework of…

Contests are usually applied in the academic environment to simulate real professional situations that require from the participants a more pro-active attitude than the one shown in conventional coursework. Although they are commonly applied in the scope of a unique course, the contest described here was an extracurricular experience applied in an…

What is it about small groups that make them so powerful? The answer is straightforward: Groups tend to solve problems better than even the brightest individuals because "many hands make light work," and "two heads are better than one." This is especially true when the groups are diverse and individuals act somewhat independently. In this month's…

From a review of instructional design theories, research, and practice, the author has derived his "First Principles of Instruction". In this article, he suggests a rubric for using these principles to evaluate existing instruction. The article presents a Course Evaluation form and accompanying demonstration and application rubrics that enable the…

A protein lacking one of the 20 common amino acids is a protein lipogram. This open-ended problem-based learning assignment deals with the evolution of proteins with biased amino acid composition. It has students query protein and metabolic databases to test the hypothesis that natural selection has reduced the frequency of each amino acid…

A graduate pharmacy course in experimental design for clinical research is described. Students work in groups to design clinically feasible, statistically valid studies on assigned problems. Individual students also perform statistical analyses on data sets generated from similar clinical studies conducted by faculty. Observations about grading…