The art classroom is abundant with opportunities to develop meaningful questions, including one that constantly drives the author's own teaching practice: How might she best engage middle school students in a generative process of inquiry when interpreting and producing creative visual culture? In 2009, Chris Grodowski began translating research…

There is a long tradition of museum research assessing visitors' personal background. In this article, we suggest an insightful way to enhance and intensify visitor analyses and adopt a more integrative approach. To this end, we draw attention to Latent Class Analysis (LCA), a classification method that allows us to investigate visitor profiles…

As previous studies suggest, titles of works of art have generally proven to be influential elements in reading and interpretation of the artworks. In the exhibition context, titles can be considered as a physical component of the museum or art gallery's space. According to the relatively new approaches, learning, being a subcategory of…

Very few studies (e.g., Arnold, 1998; Joosten-ten Brinke, et al., 2009) have examined the ways in which evaluators assess students' prior learning. This investigation explored the ways that evaluators described students' prior learning in final assessment reports at a single, multiple-location institution. Results found four themes; audience,…

Over the past two decades, American institutions have been expected to include systematic program reviews to meet accrediting standards, either by independent or governmental review agencies. Program evaluation is critical for several reasons: it provides systematic ways to assess what needs improvement or what needs changing and it provides ways…

This study explores how teaching development programs may facilitate the development of intercultural competence in graduate students and prepare them for communicating effectively in the global workplace after graduation. First, we describe the concept of intercultural teaching competence and examine the skills that graduate students may need to…

Teachers act out a play every day that includes soliloquies, dialogue, questions, cues, and demonstrations to evoke a response from their audiences. Learning requires that the students--or audience--see a new concept in a motivating and dynamic environment, a setting that provokes inquiry and an understanding of how new knowledge applies to real…

This study focused on training students in skills essential to making oral presentations based on original and independent research work as part of their English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course. As a result of the training, students showed an increase in the successful use of research-related skills and a great improvement in their ability to…

Docents--volunteer adult educators in art museums--adapt their tour content and process to best suit their audiences. This interpretive qualitative study explores the strategies docents used in four art museums in the Northeastern United States to tailor their educational activities and attempt to make them more relevant and interactive. Findings…

In the wake of several high-profile shootings at schools in the United States, most notably the shootings that occurred at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, the United States Secret Service (Secret Service) and the United States Department of Education (ED) embarked on a collaborative endeavor to study incidents of planned (or…

This paper deals with the features and design of explanations in public physics lectures. It presents the findings from a comparative study of three exemplary public physics lectures, given by practicing physicists who are acknowledged as excellent public lecturers. The study uses three different perspectives: the lecture, the lecturer, and the…

Just as all perceptions are of figures differentiated from a larger background, a play takes place against the background of the audience's knowledge and feelings. While audience members generally bring to a performance a large body of background information--they evaluate the storyline, for example, using a lifetime of personal experience--at…

This paper undertakes a review of the literature on writing cognition, writing instruction, and writing assessment with the goal of developing a framework and competency model for a new approach to writing assessment. The model developed is part of the Cognitively Based Assessments of, for, and as Learning (CBAL) initiative, an ongoing research…

The concept of knowledge gap (the discrepancy in the amount of information acquired by different groups of people reached by mass communication) can be critically examined to consider its theoretical and practical implications in the context of using communication to bring about changes in society. Some causes of knowledge gap include differences…