Youths in residential care have likely experienced trauma as they have had atypical and disruptive events occur in their lives that has contributed to their out-of-home placement. For people who have been traumatized, the regulation of emotions is an important feature of their recovery. This article presents a model that traces phases from…

Who, rather than what, decides what giftedness is? The academic world traditionally focuses on theoretical descriptors whereas society as a whole is more interested in practical function. This partly divided focus is becoming increasingly critical and problematic as economies are becoming global and the political objective is to create a knowledge…

The full promise of class room learning is dependent on its ability to incorporate 21st century skills in its instructional design, delivery and implementation. In this increasingly competitive global economy, it is not enough for students to acquire subject-level mastery alone. Skills like creative thinking, problem-solving, communication and…

This article describes the use of a progressive paper in a capstone course to develop students' writing skills. A progressive paper is one that students write one section at a time: as they add each new section, they go back and revise the previous parts based on actionable feedback from the instructor. In this course, the progressive paper takes…

The Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) in New York City is fourth among all community colleges in awarding degrees to minority students and in awarding degrees to African Americans. The BMCC student body is approximately 37 percent Hispanic, 33 percent black, 15 percent white, and 15 percent Asian. In addition, a significant proportion…

This essay uses the experience of one community engagement program at the American University of Beirut (AUB), a prominent private university in Lebanon, to reflect on the value and challenges of civic engagement in a non-Western context. It describes the Lebanese sectarian political system, provides an overview of the AUB Neighborhood Initiative,…

A homework assignment is outlined in which students learn Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) concepts of discretization, numerical stability and accuracy, and verification in a hands-on manner by solving physically realistic problems of practical interest to engineers. The students solve a transient-diffusion problem numerically using the common…

Secondary school principals face no shortage of issues and challenges when it comes to ensuring that their teachers and students are ready for the Common Core State Standards. With so many issues competing for scarce time and resources, it is understandable that for many school leaders, the needs of high-ability and high-potential students are not…

A novel course using green chemistry as the context to teach general chemistry fundamentals was designed, implemented and is described here. The course design included an active learning approach, with major course graded components including a weekly blog entry, exams, and a semester project that was disseminated by wiki and a public symposium.…

In their 2011 study "Academically Adrift," Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa present considerable evidence that undergraduates in US colleges and universities make surprisingly little progress in their first two years of college. While acknowledging the force of this argument, the authors ask whether Arum and Roksa's evidence--about students'…

This brief describes the technology transfer (TT) and knowledge translation (KT) work of Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden and the Trace Research & Development Center. The Trace Research & Development Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was established in 1971 with the development of an early augmentative communication system, which was…

This article describes a two-day lesson in which fifth-grade students took on the role of marine biology scientists, using their critical-thinking and problem-solving skills to explore human impact on the blue crab ecosystem. The purpose of "Crabby Interactions" was to help students understand the impact of human activities on the local…

In this first of a two-part series, the authors report that STEM is still mostly science and mathematics, taught separately with little or no attention to technology and engineering. Where connections do get made to technology and engineering, too often they happen through several disconnected projects that lack coherence in content standards and…

The Year Abroad (YA) is arguably the most valued feature of any languages degree, according to employers (British Academy & UCML, 2012). The resilience and problem-solving capacities developed by students who undertake a period of residence abroad are sought-after characteristics in the job market. Thus, most languages degrees in the UK…

During the winter of 2011, the author faced an instructional dilemma: Should she teach the concept of adding and subtracting fractions with unlike denominators using a "quick trick" for the sake of staying on schedule, or should she try something different in hopes that her students would gain understanding through their own methods? The latter…