This study explores the language variation in university student public speech across two academic disciplines: business administration and education. A corpus of university student public speech, made up of 102 classroom presentations (approximately 215,000 words), was designed, constructed and analysed using both quantitative and qualitative…

This study examined the role of particular tasks implemented through two instructional methods on college students' "achievement" and understanding of probability. A mixed methods design that utilized a pre-test and post-test was used. This included treatment and control groups, each comprised of students in three sections of an…

The purpose of this two-phase mixed methods research study was to examine the select noncognitive factors of academic integration, goal orientation and self-efficacy relative to the persistence of traditional and nontraditional students. First, eighty-three questionnaires were distributed to traditional and nontraditional students enrolled at a…

Today's colleges and universities are inundated with both traditional students and returning adult students, including baby boomers and retirees (Hardin, 2008). This study utilized a mixed methods research methodology to explore and analyze the perceptions of faculty members and students regarding the learning characteristics and learning…

This article presents an overview of action research conducted in an EFL university context, regarding primarily the relationship between individual possible self-images, socially constructed possible self-images, and language-learning motivation. The study used three cycles of action research over the course of one 15-week university semester,…

This study was an action research project evaluating the effectiveness of selected reading strategies on student learning. The action research was conducted in an undergraduate measurement course in a teacher preparation program. Students used a pre-selected reading strategy to read assigned readings then completed a quiz on the readings and a…

Student acceptability of various teaching formats and techniques is an important factor for teachers to consider in determining their usage and effectiveness. Cooperative learning is a technique that is utilized by teachers from elementary through higher education. The present study compared the acceptability of three cooperative learning…

A common approach for demonstrating learning in online classrooms is through submittal of research essays of a discussion topic followed by classroom participation. Issues arose at an online campus of a university regarding the originality and quality of critical thinking in the original submittals. Achievement of new course objectives oriented to…

Didactical advantages of audience response systems (ARS) have been discussed extensively ever since they have been used in classes. However, conventional ARS bear some drawbacks, such as requiring specific hardware, generating costs (text messaging based and web service fees) and creating a dependency on external hosts. In this paper we present a…

Problem Statement: In recent years, researchers on learning have focused on learning with multimodal representation and this research has shown that when learners can interact with an appropriate representation their performance is enhanced. If students have the opportunity to interact consciously with modal representation, learning can be…

Background/Context: Over the past two decades, more than 200 studies have been published on the effects of community service learning on university students. However, the majority of these studies have focused on the effects of such programming on White and affluent college students, and few have considered whether there are differential effects…

Explicit sociolinguistic instruction in language classrooms has become more widely accepted than ever, but the understanding and teaching of Canadian culture remains a controversial issue, particularly as Canadian culture becomes increasingly diverse. The degree to which Canadians are perceived to exhibit characteristics such as…

This study investigated the influence of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for teaching macroevolution on non-science majors' knowledge of macroevolution and evolution acceptance. The nature and sources of an experienced faculty member's PCK and instruction as enacted PCK (Park & Oliver, 2008) were examined to consider the influence of these…

Immigration into the U.S. will continue to increase in the coming years, thereby increasing the postsecondary enrollment of ESL students. Yet there is still a limited amount of research designed to evaluate which ESL placement programs are most effective. This study was designed to determine if the use of correct testing instruments would ensure…

This paper provides a discussion of the results of a cross-sectional examination of linguistic variables that are predicted to influence L2 reading fluency. This study is part of a larger, longitudinal mixed-methods study into reading fluency development using online Timed Reading (TR) with participants from a mid-to-high level private university…