When students learn, they activate, use, revise, and acquire knowledge. As such, knowledge is a fundamental asset. We advocate for an asset-based approach which capitalizes on students' knowledge through prompts and activities that invite learners to leverage what they already know. Considering knowledge as an asset means that educators must…

With many universities now admitting students into their science programs with little or no prior knowledge of the relevant field, significant challenges arise in the way these fields are introduced. Challenges mount with various preconceived ideas regarding the levels of difficulty, thus necessitating introductory concepts be presented in…

Past research has shown the benefit of cooperative learning in organizing instruction to promote students' engagement and achievement. However, it remains unclear whether students gain more from peers at relatively higher or similar levels of prior knowledge. Relatedly, it is important to distinguish collective performance from individual…

This article theorizes how students know when to activate knowledge acquired in FYC courses. Addressing knowledge activation as motivated by pursuing activity-specific objectives, the author calls for situating students' encounter with and acquisition of rhetorical knowledge and practices of writing as knowledge of how to perform activities other…

This study examines the effect on student academic success through teaching the "Let's Know the Matter" grade 3 science unit accompanied by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)-focused activities. The study group consisted of 24 third grade students studying in the 2019-2020 academic year. Teaching was done with a 5E…

Disciplines such as Geography are well placed to respond to the changing needs of society and the effective application of geographical knowledge to real-world problems. This project surveyed first year Geography undergraduates' understanding of "What is Geography?", both before and after an exercise in which geographic topics were…

When teachers or instructors create computer-based learning environments, they often solely consider technical aspects of interactivity. As a consequence, learners' main role is to respond to requests of the learning environment (e.g. by answering multiple-choice questions). This aspect of interactivity is, however, not sufficient to understand…

This study examined the interaction effects of self-explanation and game-reward strategies on sixth graders' algebra variable learning achievement, learning attitude, and meta-cognitive awareness. A learning system was developed to support the learning activity, and a 2×2 quasi-experiment was conducted. Ninety-seven students were invited to…

Contrary to classical problem-based learning, in guided problem-based learning, the learning goals are predetermined by the instructor--on the basis of a detailed decomposition of the subject matter to be studied--to activate prior knowledge and to structure self-study and subsequent group discussion. This study investigated the effects of…

In 2004, a group of engineering and education faculty at Virginia Tech received a major curriculum reform and engineering education research grant under the department-level reform (DLR) program of the NSF. This DLR project laid the foundation of sponsored research in engineering education in the Department of Engineering Education. The DLR…

Open educational resources (OERs) are designed to be globally reusable. Yet comparatively little attention has been given to the cultural issues. This paper addresses the issue of culturally sensitive factors that may influence the design of reusable learning objects. These influences are often subtle and hard to manage. The paper proposes a…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

Knowledge-based competition has magnified the importance of learning alliances as a fast and effective mechanism of capability development. This case presents a technology transfer project from a university's engineering research center to a private firm to illuminate learning and knowledge-based determinants of the outcomes of such projects. In…

This book is designed to help social work students prepare a social work portfolio to be used as a learning guide, and following graduation, as a tool to maintain their social work licenses or other pertinent professional credentials. There are independent and collaborative group learning exercises as well as portfolio preparation exercises…

This document presents the proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia (MERGA). The theme of this conference is "Navigating Currents and Charting Directions." The theme reminds us that, although we are constantly pushed to account for the quality and impact of our research, we…