Literature on simulation games stresses both the need for objective assessment of pedagogical effectiveness and the concern that such assessment may not be happening because it is too difficult. This article speaks to both points by presenting an approach to objectively assess the effectiveness of a simulation called the Human Rights Foreign…

Most instructors desire to create a learning environment conducive to deep learning. However, in courses where grades are based upon the accumulation of points, students may focus on collecting points rather than on learning and achieving the course objectives. We discuss an alternative points-free course design based on the development of clear…

Over the course of four years, we have researched and transformed a key course in the career of an undergraduate physics major--junior-level electricity and magnetism. With the aim of educating our majors based on a more complete understanding of the cognitive and conceptual challenges of upper-division courses, we used principles of active…

English for General Purposes (EGP) is a foundation course which should be taken by all the undergraduate students at the University of Tabriz, Iran. However, the EGP course cannot meet the students' objectives and needs. Evidently, it has some shortcoming and the results of the study indicate that it not only has lost its credibility but also has…

Any curriculum consists of several components: goals, disposition, duration, needs analysis, learners and teachers, exercises and activities, resources, ways of learning, skills to be acquired, lexis, language structure, and ability assessment. Before setting up a program or course of study, these components should be determined and described in…

We describe the development of a course to teach modeling and mathematical analysis skills to students of biology and to teach biology to students with strong backgrounds in mathematics, physics, or engineering. The two groups of students have different ways of learning material and often have strong negative feelings toward the area of knowledge…

Objective: The author reports on a required fourth-year course, Psychiatry in Medicine, which was started in 1999 at Stony Brook Medical School. The aim was to address two important concerns in medical education at Stony Brook and throughout the United States: 1) the failure to recognize psychiatric pathology in outpatient medical settings and 2)…

Objective: To allow students an opportunity to speak publicly on the first day of class while becoming familiar with fellow students. The activity encourages students to examine the perceptions and stereotypes they have about one another by blindly guessing certain characteristics about their partner. By participating in the exercise, students…

The purpose of this study was to examine existing data to determine if a significant difference existed between student evaluations from an online asynchronous and an online synchronous learning environment, as well as their impact on retaining students. The data available were from a national online university that serves students across the…

Describes a series of procedures that can objectively measure student growth in interdisciplinary humanities courses at the secondary or college level. Preinstruction and postinstruction assessments determine student attitudes, responses to literature, art, and music, and knowledge of course content; midcourse individual conferences are also used.…

Discusses student evaluation in foreign-language courses and argues that passing a multiple-choice test should not be a course objective. Suggests that achieving such an objective does not ensure that students understand the topic or that they will use their new knowledge in new situations, nor that they know how to analyze to the appropriate…

Students' understandings of the concept of social class before and after taking the Social Science Foundation course (D101) at Great Britain's Open University were investigated in 1980. Among the students' conceptions before the course was that people are middle class or working class according to their job. Other conceptions were that social…

Data from a study of the preceptorship in family medicine, a required four-week experience for fourth-year medical students at the University of North Carolina, indicate that it was a synthesis experience. Seven functions of the preceptorship, many of which were not official program goals, are identified. (Author/JMD)

Home Economics 134 was designed to teach the construction and design of clothing on a basic level for students interested in home economics teaching, professional clothes designing, or just self-enrichment. Budget restrictions over a three year period necessitated the reduction of faculty members available to teach the course from three…

This unit on aging was prepared for use in high school sociology, marriage and family classes. The objectives of the course, which can be taught in four classroom sessions, are to help students: (1) become aware of the fact that older people are individuals, differing widely in attitudes and abilities, who do not necessarily conform to the popular…