For 12 years, Denise Gillman has taught the course Science on the Stage at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. The plays studied awaken intellectual curiosity and understanding of human nature and complex scientific ideas within the framework of a good story and can do so for students of every major. This article presents how…

This article details assignments and lessons created for and tested in research methods courses at two different universities, a large state school and a small liberal arts college. Each assignment or activity utilized scaffolding. Students were asked to push beyond their comfort zone while utilizing concrete and/or creative examples,…

We spend hours teaching students where to go to find resources, but how do students really use those scholarly resources--and other resources--in their papers? Inspired by the Citation Project, University of Richmond liaison librarians examined First-Year Seminar papers to see what types of sources students used in their writing, how they…

This article outlines a three-part pedagogy capable of responding to the risks, rewards, and headaches associated with public rhetoric and writing. To demonstrate the purchase of this pedagogy, I revisit one of the oldest and most misunderstood public rhetoric and writing assignments: the letter-to-the-editor assignment.

This article seeks to provide some modest insights into the pedagogy of higher-order thinking and metacognition and to share the use of color-coded drafts as a best practice in service of both higher-order thinking and metacognition. This article will begin with a brief theoretical exploration of thinking and of thinking about thinking--the latter…

This article explores how critical thinking activities and assignments can function to enhance students' ethical awareness and sense of civic responsibility. Employing Levinas's Other-centered theory of ethics, Burke's notion of "the paradox of substance", and Murray's concept of "a rhetoric of disruption", this article…

The author of this article questions what has been gained from Berrett's exploration of the connections between competency development and individual required courses. She concludes from this analysis that students' competency development is a responsibility that cuts across many courses and many levels of expected student proficiency. To put it…

This article presents an autoethnographic and theoretical reflection on my justifications for the use of "neoliberal deconstruction" in the undergraduate social foundations classroom. I engage the reader in a discussion concerning the need to make neoliberal agendas, as they pertain to corporate reform in education, salient to students.…

Empathy and interdisciplinarity are both concepts that are current and relevant--across professions, in research, and in academia. This paper describes a large, interdisciplinary, project-based assignment, the Empathy Project, which allows students to delve into and increase comfort and skill with interdisciplinary thinking and collaborative…

In this paper, we review a variety of e-commerce startups created by senior information systems students, under the author's guidance, over a number of years at multiple universities. We compare the characteristics of the start-ups and comment on various factors which appear to have contributed to their success or failure. Our recommendations are…

One of the benefits of using films in sociology class is the opportunity media representations give students to "experience" situations that are uncommon in their daily lives. In this note the authors outline research in education that demonstrates the role of imagery and experiential learning in fostering a deeper understanding of…

In an action research project, young male students from Sydney, Australia and Richmond, USA contributed to a collaborative writing blog. Both groups of students shared the same text with their class teachers, while using the medium of collaborative blogging, a process which was facilitated and managed by the teacher-librarian. Data was gathered…

Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) researchers visited 38 public high schools around the United States in 2007 and 2008 with the goal of validating and operationalizing a definition of college readiness. Schools in the sample were selected because they were demonstrating success at enabling more students from underrepresented groups to…

The "Vocabulary Improvement Program for English Language Learners and Their Classmates" ("VIP") is a vocabulary development curriculum for English language learners and native English speakers (grades 4-6). The 15-week program includes 30-45 minute whole class and small group activities, which aim to increase students'…