Funding is an important mechanism for exercising influence over ever more parts of academic systems. In order to do so, funding agencies attempt to export their functional and normative prerequisites for financing to new fields. One essential requirement for fundees is then to construct research processes in the form of a project beforehand, one…

Many of the current issues facing humans are geologic in nature. Whether the issue is mitigating the impact of geologic hazards, reducing air and water pollution, managing the energy of mineral resources, or minimizing the impact of anthropogenic global climate change, we require a geosciences-literate population. This is crucial to developing…

This article reports on the theoretical output of a design research study, which concerns the design of a learning environment (LE) for helping students challenge the 'balance of nature'-idea and reach an up-to-date understanding about ecosystems' contingency. Our focus is set on whether it is feasible to articulate an empirically tested theory of…

Peer assessment brings new affordances to the implementation of meaningful assessment on online courses (e.g. MOOCs) by using technological solutions to automate the assessment process. For this reason, teachers need digital pedagogic skills for planning, implementing and developing effective peer assessment models. In this paper we apply the…

Community colleges continue to operate in a society of accountability and efficiencies. Throughout the country, states have implemented performance-based funding and completion agendas while also tightening or restricting funding for higher education. The state of Ohio has implemented one of the boldest performance funding plans in the country…

The Advanced Placement® Human Geography (AP HG) course has shown tremendous growth since 2001, the first year students took the end-of-course exam. Slightly more than 3,000 students took the exam that year; the number exceeded 163,000 in 2015 (Lanegran and Zeigler 2016) and is expected to grow further still. The College Board describes the course…

The purpose of this article is to address the issue that children's natural singing voices and pitch perception are in a treble range, and a male elementary general music teacher's natural singing voice is an octave below. There are many strategies to overcome this significant but manageable obstacle in daily teaching, including monitoring of…

The ability of novice instructional designers to become skilled problem-solvers, who select and apply appropriate instructional design (ID) models in their work environments, are key competencies generally sought after in introductory ID courses. Yet, the proliferation of ID models, coupled with varied philosophies and practices about how ID is…

The evaluation of intervention effects is an important objective of educational research. One way to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention is to conduct an experiment that assigns individuals to control and treatment groups. In the context of pretest/posttest designed studies, this is referred to as a control-group pretest/posttest design.…

The Participatory Action Research (PAR) model developed by Eilks and Ralle is very well known in science education. Over the years, many teaching and learning materials have been developed and implemented in German secondary schools using this method. The success of the model encouraged us to adapt it to the university level in order to develop…

Identifying and understanding student difficulties with physics content in a wide variety of topical areas is an active research area within the physics education research community. Of particular value are investigations of physics topics that appear multiple times in different contexts across the undergraduate physics curriculum. As these common…

We report a case study of model-based reasoning in which a small group of fourth-grade students analyzes the energy flow when a solar panel is used to power an electric motor that spins a propeller. In developing their explanation of energy flow, the students draw on a general model of energy developed collectively by their class in the course of…

Model evaluation -- the process of making inferences about the performance of predictive models -- is a critical component of predictive modelling research in learning analytics. We survey the state of the practice with respect to model evaluation in learning analytics, which overwhelmingly uses only naïve methods for model evaluation or…

Many engineering projects fail to meet their planned completion dates in real practice. This is a recurrent topic in the project management literature, with poor planning and controlling practices frequently cited among the most significant causes of delays. Unfortunately, hardly any attention has been paid to the fact that the classical…

Many teachers are confused about how to implement the phenomena-based teaching recommended by the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013). This article describes one possible approach--purposely repurposing existing activities. This process involves having teachers: (1) Choose a phenomenon that informs the development…