To properly prepare pre-service school librarians, school library educators in online courses must provide opportunities for collaborative engagement. This collaborative education should also recognize the pedagogical benefit of the organic formation of communities of practice that develop within areas outside of curriculum content. This…

This study examines the extent to which college seniors' plans for graduate school are related to their tendency to engage in deep approaches to learning (DAL) and their academic environments (majors) as classified by Holland type. Using data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, we analyzed responses from over 116,000 seniors attending…

One way to engage all students and ensure that they feel valued within a classroom is to provide opportunities for learning that tap into varied intelligences. According to Howard Gardner, "It is of the utmost importance that we recognize and nurture all of the varied human intelligences, and all of the combinations of intelligences."…

Many books and articles on teaching strategies and techniques, as well as manuals prepared by college teaching and faculty development support groups, stress the importance of being organized, engaging the students, and faculty making themselves available to their students. This paper discusses how being the first to arrive and the last to leave…

This article reports findings from a survey of middle level teacher educators to determine their views of online teacher education. The questions were grounded in the literature about effective middle level education and the important aspects of providing teacher preparation unique to those seeking to teach young adolescent learners. The survey…

Although it is well known that music can affect cognitive processes, little research has been conducted examining the influence of background music on students in information literacy classrooms. In 2010, librarians at Western Michigan University investigated the effect of background music on student engagement and retention of information…

Student engagement is widely recognised as an important influence on achievement and learning in higher education and as such is being widely theorised and researched. This article firstly reviews and critiques the four dominant research perspectives on student engagement: the behavioural perspective, which foregrounds student behaviour and…

The findings from 20 years of research on undergraduate education have been unequivocal: The more actively engaged students are--with college faculty and staff, with other students, and with the subject matter they study--the more likely they are to learn, to stick with their studies, and to attain their academic goals. The existing literature,…

Gerontologists face a unique set of obstacles in attracting newcomers to the field. Despite demographic trends favorable to a wide range of employment opportunities and job security, aging is rarely top of mind for many students when it comes to career choices. For most gerontologists, aging is our passion. How do we share that passion with others…

Within the field of science education, there remains little agreement as to the definition and characteristics of classroom inquiry. The emerging emphasis on scientific practices in science education reform discourse is underpinned by a need to better articulate the constituent elements of inquiry-based science. While a small number of…

For many teachers of middle school and high school, the greatest challenge they face in trying to help struggling readers improve their skills can be students' self-perception. When young people do not see themselves as members of the "literacy club," it is not just a simple matter of persuading them that becoming a fluent reader is…

Few terms in the lexicon of higher education today are invoked more frequently, and in more varied ways, than "engagement". The phrase "student engagement" has come to refer to how "involved" or "interested" students appear to be in their learning and how "connected" they are to their classes,…

The author began his first year teaching at an open-enrollment university with the belief that "most students can learn to do intellectual work, if they are only given the opportunity." This belief is inspired by the research on teaching and learning and is rooted in the characteristic idealism of teachers. He had seen the principle borne out in…

This study aimed to investigate the structural relationships among teaching presence, cognitive presence, usage, learning flow, satisfaction, and learning persistence in corporate e-learners. The research participants were 462 e-learners registered for cyber-lectures through an electronics company in South Korea. The extrinsic variables were sense…

Classroom emotional climates (ECs) are interrelated with students' engagement with university courses. Despite growing interest in emotions and EC research, little is known about the ways in which social interactions and different subject matter mediate ECs in preservice science teacher education classes. In this study we investigated the EC…