In introductory math courses such as precalculus, students often have difficulty with assignments that require explanations or synthesizing knowledge. When students receive low scores on such assignments, instructors often wish to help students understand the material they struggled with. A common strategy is to allow the students to revise and…

This article describes pedagogical practices that support deeper learning within an academic program. An assignment is presented that simulates the post-graduate challenge of incorporating soft skills with discipline knowledge. The assignment tasks students with investigating a new problem or opportunity using information from a variety of…

In this conceptual paper, borne from the experiences of two academic literacy lecturers at the NWU, we ask, regarding elements of assessment, how we can sensibly adapt an intervention-style writing course in a post-COVID higher education context. We propose a course correction model, applicable to academic literacy writing courses, to address the…

How can information literacy (IL) skills be improved during one semester? The proliferation of information disorders - fabricated stories, misleading content, clickbait - requires skills beyond using a fake-news checklist. Students in an introductory political science course were asked to analyze a news story every week as a course objective to…

This design case documents the motivations, decisions, and results of an experimental course that involved students in the curriculum development process through the use of design thinking methodology. Primary points of student input were determining assignment topics, developing learning objectives, and contributing to the design of grading…

Background: The perception of college students' health is overall positive, yet research indicates that they engage in negative behaviors that can lead to long-term health consequences. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the feasibility of a course activity as an opportunity for students to assess their own health behaviors, which…

This paper argues that curriculum decision-making in the South African University of Technology (UoT) environment is affected not only by industry and disciplinary demands, but also by socio-structural features and ideologies particular to this educational sector. It supports the view that recontextualisation processes are subject to multiple…

Recently, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has called for proposals on the "greening" of the Spanish curriculum for their 2020 convention. University students are and will be faced with complex twenty-first-century economic problems, such as food deserts, costs of industrial agriculture, organic regulations and market demand,…

Despite a strong pedagogical orientation, the majority of research examining the effectiveness of task-based language teaching (TBLT) and perceptions toward TBLT has been investigated in isolation rather than embedded in larger curricular contexts (McDonough, 2015]). The current study examines the process of developing a TBLT curriculum in South…

Engineering design is known as an answer to an ill-defined problem. As any answer to an ill-defined problem, it can never be completely right or absolutely wrong. The methods that universities use to teach engineering design, as a consequence of this, suffer from the same fate. However, the accumulated experience with the "chalk and…

Student success in higher education often involves the effective integration of source texts into students' writing (Horowitz, 1986); therefore, advanced second language (L2) students are particularly well served by effective reading-to-write instruction. Teaching L2 students to write from sources is challenging because of several issues,…

This mini-article describes a faculty meeting process used for curriculum planning. The proffered outline helped us document and assess our program, to focus our conversation, to envision where we wanted students to be, and to share across the curriculum what was happening in our solitary courses. The results prompted us to share with each other…

To develop information literacy skills in chemistry and biochemistry majors at a primarily undergraduate institution, a multiyear collaboration between chemistry faculty and librarians has resulted in the establishment of a semester-long capstone project for Organic Chemistry II. Information literacy skills were instilled via a progressive…

The impetus to incorporate instruction on the efficient and responsible practice of chemical information literacy into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum has become exceptionally urgent. At Rider University, Chemical Information Instruction (CII) has accordingly evolved from face-to-face sessions into online modules to embed information…

An adaptation of the traditional literary concept of close reading was developed for use in a largely multilingual classroom in which both first language (L1) and second language (L2) students were struggling to comprehend theoretical, lexically dense texts in English. This simplified method of reading a text iteratively and critically is proving…