Can online collaboration yield a positive effect on academic writing in a foreign language? If so, what exactly is the added value, compared to individual writing, and (how) does it translate to better output? These are the central questions addressed in this paper. L2 writing research has long highlighted the benefits of collaboration in terms of…

To begin to assess the impact of service-learning participation on subsequent use of Spanish, this study compares survey responses of students who completed conventional and service-learning sections of the same intermediate university Spanish conversation course. Their responses suggest that the students who experienced service-learning generally…

This research study examined two intervention programs, Read Naturally (computer-assisted) and The Six-Minute Solution (teacher-guided), for the purpose of finding their effects on reading fluency with 3rd grade students at an elementary school. The participants were from two separate third grade classrooms, randomly assigned to one of the two…

Higher education research is a developing field internationally, attracting more and more researchers from a great variety of disciplinary backgrounds within and beyond higher education institutions. As such, it is an arena within which a wide range of theories, methods, and methodologies are being applied. As an expanding multidisciplinary area…

Purpose: New teaching concepts in IS are highly relevant to deliver practical skills to IS students, as demanded by business practice. There are different approaches for providing knowledge. The authors differentiate between teacher-centered and learner-centered approaches when designing new IS courses. The latter is characterized by creating…

Teachers' beliefs about pedagogical practices and disciplinary procedures as well as their perceptions of students powerfully influence the corresponding approaches they utilize. The student teaching experience is cited as one of the most critical facets of teachers' professional development. That which is learned by student teachers…

Team-Based Learning (TBL) maximizes class time for student practice in complex problems using peer learning in an instructor-guided format. Generally entire courses are structured using the comprehensive guidelines of TBL. We used TBL in a subsection of a veterinary course to determine if it remained effective in this format. One section of the…

This article describes the results of a study comparing attitudes toward mental illness and perceptions of professional danger among new social work students (n=64) and other university students (n=111). Such topics have implications for social work education and curriculum development but have not been studied adequately. Results from…

Categorization is one of the fundamental building blocks of cognition, and the study of categorization is notable for the extent to which formal modeling has been a central and influential component of research. However, the field has seen a proliferation of noncomplementary models with little consensus on the relative adequacy of these accounts.…

As the workplace becomes more international, it is necessary to periodically examine the learning preferences of adults from different cultures in order to enhance their transfer of learning. This study explored whether there was any different instructional preference between Western and nonresident Far East Asian (NFEA, also Confucian-influenced)…

Historically speaking, students were judged long before they were marked. The tradition of marking, or scoring, pieces of work students offer for assessment is little more than two centuries old, and was introduced mainly to cope with specific problems arising from the growth in the numbers graduating from universities as the industrial revolution…

Increasingly, researchers interested in identifying potentially biased test items are encouraged to use a confirmatory, rather than exploratory, approach. One such method for confirmatory testing is rooted in differential bundle functioning (DBF), where hypotheses regarding potential differential item functioning (DIF) for sets of items (bundles)…

We used an adapted alternating treatments design to evaluate and compare the effects of 2 spelling interventions on spelling acquisition and maintenance, word reading, and vocabulary in three first-grade students. The first intervention, Cover, Copy, and Compare (CCC), involved having participants look at a word, cover it, write it, then compare…

This article considers key differences and similarities between Freirean and Taoist ideals. I limit my focus to the "Tao Te Ching" (attributed to Lao Tzu), paying brief attention to the origins of this classic work of Chinese philosophy before concentrating on several themes of relevance to Freire's work. An essay by James Fraser (1997), who makes…

This article provides a frame for evaluation of natural resource interventions, which necessarily involves both human and natural systems. Two-system evaluands require us to adapt evaluation methods for comparison and attribution and to address differences in time and space occurring across the systems as well as potentially very different values…