The transition between school and university can be problematic for students. Understanding students' expectations about the system they are entering is crucial in effecting a smooth transition. The school system involves small classes, often with teachers who know their students well. In contrast, university involves large class sizes and a…

Aim/Purpose: This study aimed to examine whether there is a difference between manual feedback and online feedback with regard to feedback quality, respondents' percentage, reliability and the amount of verbal comments written by students. Background: The quality of teaching is an important component of academic work. There are various methods for…

Individuals with disabilities comprise the largest minority group in the world, yet they are the most underrepresented minority group in higher education, the job market and entertainment media such as literature. This population is often underrepresented because of the overlapping physical, attitudinal and policy barriers that prevent them from…

Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) have been used in traditional university classrooms as a strategy to check for student understanding (Angelo & Cross, 1993). With the emergence of online learning and its popularity for non-traditional students, it is equally important that instructors in the online environment check for student…

Students' inaccurate ideas about what is represented by chemical equations and concepts underlying stoichiometry are well documented; however, there are few classroom-ready instructional solutions to help students build scientifically accurate ideas about these topics central to learning chemistry. An intervention (two inquiry-based activities)…

The authors examined the sustainability of income, as it relates to educational attainment, from the two recent decades, which includes three significant economic downturns. The data was analyzed to determine trends in the wealth gap, parsed by educational attainment and gender. Utilizing the data from 1991 through 2010, predictions in changes in…

The future of higher education is likely to be driven by to the willingness to adapt and grow with the use of technologies in teaching, learning, and research. Google Apps for Education (GAFE) is a powerful cloud-computing solution that works for students regardless of their location, time, or the type of device being used. GAFE is used by…

There has been an exponential growth of e-learning in the UK Higher Education. However, there is a growing opinion that e-learning practitioners are not critical enough and that they should adopt a more techno-negative or techno-scepticism approach when implementing new e-learning tools. In this paper we use a techno-scepticism framework to assess…

Designed for students and educational professionals researching students' movement into and through higher education, "Crafting and Conducting Research on Student Transitions" is a concise resource, describing both qualitative and quantitative methods. The authors walk readers through the process of selecting a topic, designing a study,…

Despite concerted efforts by science educators to understand patterns of evolutionary reasoning in science students and teachers, the vast majority of evolution education studies have failed to carefully consider or control for item feature effects in knowledge measurement. Our study explores whether robust contextualization patterns emerge within…

The value of qualitative assessment approaches has been underestimated primarily because they are often juxtaposed against long-standing quantitative traditions and the widely accepted premise that the best research produces generalizable and statistically significant findings. Institutional researchers avoid qualitative methods for at least three…

This study explores variation in postgraduate students' and supervisors' conceptions of research. Based on earlier work, a Conceptions of Research Inventory (CoRI) was trialled on a mixed sample of postgraduate students and supervisors (n = 251). Exploratory factor analyses of resultant data yields a five-dimensional empirical model, the…

Dissertations are the cumulative, tangible "best evidence" of interests of doctoral faculty and students in serious and incisive scholarship. Thus, dissertations are thoroughly studied by the program review teams periodically hired by boards of higher education in most states. The present paper explores seven errors in quantitative…

Educators' fear of statistics stems from various factors, including deficiencies in their preparation programs: insufficient relevance, inadequately integrated technologies, and stress on inferential statistics. Attendance statistics are worthless unless principals and superintendents can interpret them and incorporate them into their…