Many engineering courses rely on in-person lectures and textbooks for content delivery, with homework sets and exams for evaluating and reinforcing student progress. Yet some research studies have shown that exams--high-pressure, time-limited assessments--are detrimental to the learning process and unnecessarily increase students' stress. We…

Maximising students' creative potential to address contemporary issues and fostering cross-disciplinary learning are on the agenda of both top-down and bottom-up educational initiatives. Within the framework of research about cross-disciplinary learning and collaboration, this article argues for the capacity of cross-disciplinary online…

This is the second of two articles about the National Science Foundation-funded Engineering for All (EfA) program which focuses on engineering as a potential social good, revisits major Technology and Engineering (T&E) themes (design, modeling, systems, resources, and human values) in two authentic social contexts (Food and Water), and uses…

Project-based learning often centers learning experiences around projects and is characterized by the application of knowledge, management of resources, and self-directed learning. In recent years, newer classroom designs have been developed to facilitate communication, classroom interaction and active learning but the cost of such spaces can be…

College Promise programs aim to make students believe they can afford college, and to give them the opportunity to go to college and earn degrees without taking on significant debt. At the core of all College Promise programs is a scholarship: All eligible College Promise students receive scholarships that may cover up to 100 percent of tuition…

Although the number of international experience requirements (IER) for college students is growing, there is limited research on their impact. The authors present a four-year study of the impact on an IER at the University of Michigan's Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design, comparing outcomes for required and non-required cohorts. Evaluation…

In 2010 Michigan State University launched the first hybrid doctoral program in Educational Technology. This 5-year program blends face-to-face and online components to engage experienced, working education professionals in doctoral study. In this paper, we describe the design and evolution of the program as well as the response from students. We…

Academic libraries are well lauded for offering supportive spaces for students' self-directed study, and significant resources are dedicated to librarian instruction in the classroom. What many academic libraries lack, however, is a middle ground, a routine way for students to help one another using best practices in peer-to-peer learning theory.…

Active learning tools are critical in imparting real world experiences to the students within a classroom environment. This is important because graduates are expected to develop software that meets rigorous quality standards in functional and application domains with little to no training. However, there is a well-recognized need for the…

For a basic foundation in computer engineering, universities traditionally teach synchronous sequential circuit design, using discrete gates or field programmable gate arrays, and a microcomputers course that includes basic I/O processing. These courses, though critical, expose students to only a small subset of tools. At co-op schools like…

Objective: To evaluate the short-term outcome of the social marketing approach used in Project FIT, we developed a school- and community-based programme for promoting healthful eating and physical activity in kindergarten to 5th-grade children and their parents. Design: A 2-year quasi-experiment for children and two cross-sectional surveys for…

This study investigates and compares the relative importance of Web module design dimensions and their attributes as perceived by student participants in a research study and those defined by a selected group of researchers in the literature. We aim to understand whether the dimensions of clarity, organization, structure, visual/aesthetical…

The 21st century learner resides in an advanced global society that is led by the waves of the economy, advances in the technological world, concern around our safety and security, as well as demographical changes (Carver & Markatos-Soriano, 2007). The trends suggest education needs to equip students with the attitudes that promote respect for…

Research on study abroad focuses on the development of learning outcomes and assessment (Bolen, 2007) or program design, such as level of integration with local student population, housing situation, and level of interaction with host culture (Brecht & Robinson, 1993; Engle & Engle, 2004; Georgetown Consortium Research Project, n.d.;…

This article presents findings from an investigation of the overall effectiveness of Michigan's Freedom to Learn (FTL) One-to-One initiative. The major goal of the FTL initiative was to help students to gain 21st century knowledge and skills while increasing their learning and achievement through the integration of over 20,000 laptop computers…