Internationally, there has been increasing emphasis on the teaching of the academic literacies, particularly reading and writing, in higher education institutions. However, recent research is highlighting the need for more explicit teaching of multimodal forms of communication, such as the visual literacies, in undergraduate courses in a wide…

The present study was designed to investigate: (a) the effect of podcasts in EFL students' oral performance, (b) the effect of podcasts in EFL students' speaking anxiety, (c) the relationship between speaking anxiety and oral performance, and (d) EFL students' perceptions of using podcasts. This study was conducted in a high school in Istanbul,…

This study investigated students' attitudes, engagement, satisfaction, and performance in Introduction to Environmental Science after it was transformed from a typical large lecture to a student-centered learning environment. The instructors of the course collaborated with the Office of Teaching, Learning & Technology and radically redesigned…

Health professional students must be equipped with the skills necessary to interact with patients. Effective interpersonal skills are difficult to both learn and teach, requiring development, practise and evaluation in both educational and clinical settings. In professions such as physiotherapy, traditional approaches to teaching these skills have…

This quasi-experimental mixed methods study examined the use of e-readers during guided reading instruction and its impact on 5th grade students' reading motivation, attitude toward reading, and reading comprehension. For 10 weeks, 19 students received guided reading instruction by means of the traditional paper/text format, while 16 students…

The debate about the effectiveness of alternate route teacher preparation programs continues in K-12 schools and institutions of higher learning. As alternate route teacher programs continue to prepare more and more teachers for the K-12 classroom, these programs will continue to face scrutiny regarding their effectiveness. This current study…

Formative Evaluation is a method of evaluating a program while the program activities are forming or happening. Formative evaluation focuses on the "process" during which problems are timely spotted, corrected and adjustments made so that an intended goal can be accomplished. Through a four-month empirical research work with students of…

This article is to report an action research conducted in two sections of a course called Second Language Acquisition and Development during the fall semester of 2011 and the spring semester of 2012. By focusing on a three-way blended learning (BL) environment--face-to-face (F2F), eLearning, and Second Life (SL, a virtual-world environment), this…

The authors report on an exploratory pilot project implemented in a large city on the U.S.-Mexico border. The project focuses on a curricular design in a secondary school where beginning-level English as a second language students are taught English language arts in Spanish. The researchers sought to determine whether these students made greater…

The present study investigated the effect of online peer feedback through blogs on Turkish EFL students' writing performance and their perceptions. Data were collected by using: a) Turkish EFL Students' Background Survey, b) interviews at the beginning and end of the term, c) first and revised drafts, and d) end-of-semester Questionnaire. The…

A study was performed to evaluate the effects of tutor initiated telephone communication on students' course completion rates and their quantitative achievements in the Norwegian NKI distance education program. Secondary goals of the project were to assess other consequences of teletutoring, such as organization, costs, and student and tutor…

Describes a study conducted at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University (New York) that measured librarians' opinions of and attitudes toward a self-paced bibliographic instruction workbook. Survey results were compared for librarians who used the self-paced approach and those who followed a traditional approach. (Contains six references.)…

The purpose of this report is to communicate findings on current knowledge of simulation design, development, and evaluation. Research on this project was guided by questions posed by the Defense Systems Management College in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. These questions fall into three categories: the constituents of good instructional simulations, the…