Building on classical and recent studies of the learning paradigm of higher education, the author distinguishes between receiving ideas and using them and how universities might educate students to be more open to the world, open to discovery and creativity. [This is a reprint of an article originally published in "New Directions for Teaching…

This essay recounts efforts to teach liberal arts to engineering, nursing, pharmacy, and pre-medicine majors. Showing how various forms of public media reinforce harmful ideologies about social identities in the United States serves as a convergence between preprofessional disciplines and the liberal arts. At the same time, City as Text™ offers…

Building on classical and recent studies of the learning paradigm of higher education, the author distinguishes between receiving ideas and using them and how universities might educate students to be more open to the world, open to discovery and creativity.

Every object we think of or encounter, whether a natural or human-made, has a regular or irregular shape. In its own intrinsic conceptual design, it has elements of mathematics, science, engineering, and arts, etc., which are part of the object's geometric shape, form and structure. Geometry is not only an important part of mathematics, but it is…

Western cultural practices contribute to our understanding of the purpose of higher education and how we are to conduct ourselves in educational contexts. In this article, entitled "Seekers after truth?", I analyse recent works of popular fiction which draw on and contribute to the idea that postgraduate research is a process of locating and…

Understanding how the periodic table of elements is organized and how to read information from it is fundamental for understanding chemistry. Introductory chemistry courses usually include discussions detailing what elemental information can be determined by virtue of its position on the periodic table. Although many people have been exposed to…

General education must develop in students an appreciation of the power of science, how it works, why it is an effective knowledge generation tool, and what it can deliver. Knowing what science has discovered is desirable but less important.

Teaching remote sensing in higher education has been traditionally restricted in lecture and computer-aided laboratory activities. This paper presents and evaluates an engaging inquiry-based educational experiment. The experiment was incorporated in an introductory remote sensing undergraduate course to bridge the gap between theory and…

By working through a series of problems, undergraduate psychology students in an introductory statistics course discover for themselves the main topic of the lesson. A lecture follows to conceptualize and clarify the topic. (RM)

Advocates a method for teaching college mathematics that uses a carefully selected sequence of problems and theorems that enable students to prove and present material for the class. This modified form limits the amount of student presentation, thus making the method accessible to lower-level classes but at the same time facilitating use of…

Discussion of basic instructional methods highlights four in particular: didactic, Socratic, inquiry, and discovery. Examples and descriptions of each method are given for elementary, secondary, and higher education; applications of each method are examined; and what teachers can do is considered. (eight references) (LRW)

Details are given of a university course that utilizes computer programing to help students explore aspects of number theory. The course is thought to provide acceleration of the discovery process to the point where pupils can study a full range of topics. (MP)

Discusses methods for enhancing student motivation, particularly in information literacy courses in higher education. Topics include Keller's ARCS (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction). motivation model; course design; teaching behaviors; teacher enthusiasm; clarity in presenting materials; interaction; active engagement; cooperative…

The teaching of politics and administration has much to gain from incorporating the experimental outlook of the field of Human Resources Development (HRD). Typically, instructors focus on the five goals in political science education (informational, analytical, synthetic, normative, and applied) separately, hoping that integration will occur…