Online instruction is a growing method of delivering course content in higher education. However, little research has been conducted regarding the effectiveness of such instruction for pre-service teachers, in both general education and special education, who will teach students with disabilities. In this chapter we briefly review the literature…

There exists a natural connection between civic engagement and the public speaking class. Too often, however, this connection remains indirect at best and lost in a sea of uninspired topic selections and convenient source cites at worst. This assignment offers one way to help public speaking students increase their civic awareness and imagination…

Over a three-semester period in a large undergraduate human development course, students were assigned to 5-7 member groups to work together in preparing for an exam in one of the five content units in the course. Their exam performance was tracked over three units: a baseline unit in which students worked only individually, a unit in which they…

According to Standards for Technological Literacy (STL; ITEA, 2000/ 2002), technology education can play an important role in integrating the subjects of the K-12 curriculum. In fact, STL, developed with a "cross-disciplinary perspective," (Dugger, 1999) overlaps considerably with other common school subjects, especially social studies and…

There is a pervasive perspective that both students and college courses are not what they used to be. A utility maximization model exhibits why students prefer easier courses to those that provide more challenge, and presumably more knowledge. The model also demonstrates why faculty members accommodate these students with less stringent courses.…

Service learning pedagogy often assumes a variety of forms when connected with classroom teaching. Through a creative use of service learning pedagogy, the author constructs learning designs that foster student engagement with course content and prompts interrelated connections between the subjects and their own service learning experiences. The…

The recently promulgated IT model curriculum contains IT fundamentals (ITF) as one of its knowledge areas. It is intended to give students a broad understanding of (1) the IT profession and the skills that students must develop to become successful IT professionals and (2) the academic discipline of IT and its relationship to other disciplines.…

This paper describes a series of attempts by a novice teacher educator to foster reflective talk among interns in a weekly seminar. Drawing on Dewey's dilemma of bridging the child's inclinations with the demands of the curriculum, the paper explores the challenge of connecting interns' needs with teacher educators' goals. The paper advocates the…

This contribution to the "Comments" section first introduces a metric designed to estimate the amount of attention given to different countries of the world in academia using Internet "term paper mills". This metric is used to introduce a call for the incorporation of more geographic education regarding peripheral areas of the world into the…

The author surveyed counselor education programs accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs regarding the importance placed on eating disorders in counselor preparation and how they may be addressed. Most respondents valued the topic, and most did include or would consider including eating disorders…

We describe a team-taught course entitled Chaos in Science and Literature. Our course goals were to place science in a nontechnological context, emphasizing its intellectual and cultural aspects, and to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas between "scientists" and "humanists," with the authors serving as role models. (Contains 4 figures.)

The strategy of getting students to understand science content using critical thinking has been widely used by instructors for decades. The methodology presented here was used to teach and improve critical-thinking skills in an atmosphere that focused on content material and was devoid of educational terminology. (Contains 2 figures.)

The Standards of Learning in this publication represent a major development in public education in Virginia. Adopted in February 2007 by the Virginia Board of Education, these standards emphasize the importance of foreign language instruction in the Commonwealth and, therefore, are an important part of Virginia's efforts to provide challenging…

Research makes it clear that the critical factor in whether a student succeeds in college is the "quality and intensity" of the curriculum he or she takes in high school. For many Latino students, access to a high-quality, rigorous K-12 curriculum is limited. In those states where there was an existing movement to align the local P-16…

In 1998, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) launched an ambitious effort to create on-line science courses for K-12 educators that would immerse them in exciting science topics and give them access to the Museum's scientific resources (scientists, research, expeditions, collections, and exhibitions). This project, called Seminars on…