Learning musical instruments requires a significant amount of independent, unsupervised effort by students in the current post-secondary pedagogical context. A vital role of the teacher is therefore to help a student improve at the art of independent practice. The theory of contextual interference in skills learning has demonstrated better…

Teaching record keeping for breeding projects in a way that keeps youths engaged is a difficult task. The activity discussed in this article was used to teach 4-H participants the importance of record keeping by implementing the experiential learning model and without lecturing. A description of the activity, instructions and materials for the…

We designed a hands-on laboratory exercise to demonstrate why injecting an aqueous polymer solution into an oil reservoir (commonly known as "polymer flooding") enhances oil production. Students are split into three groups of two to three. Each group is assigned to a packed Hele-Shaw cell pre-saturated with oil, our laboratory model of…

The beginning of a new school year can be hectic, but it is an opportune and critical time for teachers, supervisors, administrators, and school systems to establish proper safety procedures and practices. It can be more difficult to correct inappropriate behaviors or unsafe habits later in the year. This is especially true if a safety accident…

Emergent bilingual students draw on their linguistic repertoires, moving fluidly between named languages and varieties to meet communicative ends. However, these translanguaging abilities are often not supported in English-dominant school settings. The author proposes six design principles that educators can use to create instructional strategies…

Educators are committed to understanding one another in their community as they explore their diversity. The home visit unit of study represents one of the earliest examples of "student research" done at the school where these authors teach, which serves children in pre-kindergarten classes through grade eight. A home visit is a field…

In this paper, we propose a set of activities based on the use of a celestial simulator to gain insights into the retrograde motion of Mars as seen from the Earth. These activities provide a useful link between the heliocentric concepts taught in schools and those tackled in typical introductory physics courses based on classical mechanics for…

The learner-centered paradigm of education requires very different roles for technology, as well as for teachers and students, compared with the teacher-centered paradigm. Rather than almost exclusively serving the teacher for teaching, technology primarily serves the student for learning. It does so through four major roles: (1) keeping records…

Student Service Learning (SSL) provides students the opportunity to actively participate in the community and build the skills they need to be successful students and citizens. This booklet provides information about the Maryland State Department of Education SSL graduation mandate. Completing 75 SSL hours is a requirement for high school…

Developing good record-keeping habits is essential for organizing, processing, and communicating experimental results objectively. Therefore, the authors designed an interactive method of teaching first graders to record, organize, and interpret data as they studied the life cycle of the spotted salamander ("Ambystoma maculatum"). In their…

An integrated technical writing and design course has been developed at Rowan University. This course was developed using aspects of project-based learning and recent discussions about design education, as well as pedagogical approaches from the write-to-learn and the writing in the disciplines (WID) movements. The result is a course where the…

An approach to improving classroom instruction is offered that advances a longitudinal, cyclical presentation of instruction, its evaluation, and revision over time. This approach is distinguished by student self-graphing of student performances, a teacher's log of changes made in instruction, and a class graph kept by the teacher or students. The…

An individualized reading approach is described in which teachers list specific sequenced reading objectives on separate skill cards, marking the date accomplished by special education students. (CL)

The need for teacher level administrative tasks is identified. One solution offered is Computer Managed Instruction with a review of the literature and a model showing teacher, computer, and student interaction. A chart of important criteria for evaluating Computer Managed Instructional Systems is supplied. After synthesizing conclusions, some…

Two proponents of the precision teaching approach to teaching the handicapped discuss such principles as: the problem of partial application of the method; relationship to behaviorism; relationship to experiential learning; and the importance of fluency in task performance, mastery learning, and recordkeeping. (DB)