Higher education institutions increasingly recognise the need to develop both disciplinary knowledge and soft skills to foster the employability of their graduates. For students in International Studies programmes, the workplace opportunities to develop soft skills relevant to their intended professions are scarce, costly and unavailable to many.…

Across the United States, political leaders, educators, and business persons are issuing an urgent call for reform in STEM education (NGSS Lead States 2013). One important response to this call is Integrated STEM, which the National Governor's Association (2007, p. 7) says involves, "... an emphasis on design and problem solving in…

One of the primary expectations that the author has for her students is for them to develop greater independence when solving complex and unique mathematical problems. The story of how the author supports her students as they gain confidence and independence with complex and unique problem-solving tasks, while honoring their expectations with…

The 21st century is seeing dramatic shifts in the business environment. In order for organizations to adapt to these shifts, they must be more flexible and learning oriented. To thrive in this environment, organizational leaders must facilitate and build the capacity for learning throughout the organization. Organizational leadership is looking…

The world needs great individual educational changemakers capable of identifying problems and creating bold, scalable solutions. But the world also needs Dream Teams--groups of talented administrators, teachers, staff, students, and community members who are passionate about making things better for kids, believe that school-based change is the…

This study is aimed to construct a model to transform word "motion problems" in to an algorithmic form in order to be processed by an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). First; categorizing the characteristics of motion problems, second; suggesting a model for the categories were carried out. In order to solve all categories of the…

To show students how engineering design practices reduce the impacts of a natural hazard, the authors--two science educators and an elementary teacher--taught a three-day 5E lesson that focused on hurricanes. They specifically focused on hurricanes because their students are located near a coastal area and are familiar with the effects of this…

Arthur Cropley (2006) emphasized the critical place that convergent thinking has in creativity. Although he briefly refers to the blind variation and selective retention (BVSR) theory of creativity, his discussion could not reflect the most recent theoretical and empirical developments in BVSR, especially the resulting combinatorial models.…

To familiarize first-year students with the important ingredients of a physics experiment, we offer them a project close to their daily life: measuring the effect of air resistance on a bicycle. Experiments are done with a bicycle freewheeling on a downhill slope. The data are compared with equations of motions corresponding to different models…

Proliferation of prescriptive models in an "engineering" field is not a sign of its maturity. Quite the opposite. Materials engineering, for example, meets the criterion of parsimony. Sadly, the very large number of models in "instructional design," putatively an engineering field, raises questions about its status. Can the…

In science education, conventional problem practice hardly helps students reach "conceptual understanding" with which they can solve various problems by making appropriate models of target systems. Students often superficially read the solution of a problem and apply it wrongly to others without understanding the model. It is difficult…

A great deal of research in educational data mining is geared towards predicting student performance. Bayesian Knowledge Tracing, Performance Factors Analysis, and the different variations of these have been introduced and have had some success at predicting student knowledge. It is worth noting, however, that very little has been done to…

The aim of the paper is to provide a process model to evaluate mathematical problem solving by analogy, in order to better determine at which point and under what conditions a learner is prompted to use analogies. The model is a theoretical construct. Qualitative results of an empirical study are used to underline and illustrate core aspects of…

Because researchers know so much more about the brain and development than they did when the 20th-century U.S. education system was designed, this knowledge can now be used to design a system in which all individuals are able to take advantage of high-quality opportunities for transformative learning and development. This playbook suggests a set…

This dissertation explored the roles schools can play in the successful outcomes of large carnivore or keystone reintroduction projects. Schools are more than centers for knowledge acquisition--they connect their community and disseminate information quickly to a wide audience. This study took place in California's Eastern Sierra Nevada, a…