Teaching is a skill that can and should be taught in graduate education. Fortunately, many departments offer some teacher training for their graduate students to prepare them to teach introductory and other survey courses. What is apparently still lacking is training for graduate students to teach upper-level seminar-style classes. Therefore, we…

Diversity-centered courses may prompt student biases and misconceptions in unique ways. Studies have illustrated that developing an understanding of why value-laden content is difficult for students to learn is paramount to effective teaching. Research has indicated that self-reflection has a positive effect on academic growth. This study explores…

Because strong oral communication skills have well-known academic, social, and professional benefits, they are increasingly targeted and reinforced throughout general education programs in higher education. In these efforts, public speaking assignments most often ask students to discuss information they have previously written about (e.g., theses…

Various pedagogical strategies promote the development of communication skills that enable graduates to leave their mark and make positive changes in society. This article focuses on instructional lessons learned from undergraduate student perspectives of the pedagogy of the lightning talk, a three-minute oral presentation delivered without the…

This article outlines a three-phased approach to enhancing online student-instructor interaction using asynchronous threaded discussions: check-ins. These instructor-initiated touchpoints, a form of Classroom Assessment Technique, are staged throughout the grading period to help affirm online presence, clarify expectations, monitor performance,…

Many departments in colleges and universities require a capstone course that involves the students conducting a research project. This author has had over 20 years of experience teaching such a capstone course and describes a flexible research method for student research projects -- the vignette study (an experiment embedded in a survey). She also…

This article discusses and elaborates on how concept mapping as a specific instructional strategy helps students to externalize and transform their understanding of qualitative research; and helps instructors to focus on their students' conceptual understanding of qualitative research. The discussion focuses on concept mapping as a learning…

This paper explores how two assistant professors who come from diverse paradigmatic, theoretical, and methodological perspectives collaborated for impact to co-teach in a literacy doctoral program. Initially, we grappled with naming and negotiating our differences individually and professionally across race, culture, theory, and methodology.…

The purpose of this study is to understand similarities and differences between faculty and community partners' teachable moments with college students in service-learning. Twenty-two faculty and 20 community partners reported on four main themes. Similarities included students understanding differences between themselves and the people they…

Psychometrics is the field of designing tests and assessments to measure certain psychological concepts. It is chiefly concerned with two fundamental properties: reliability and validity. These properties are often influenced by confounding variables: other things that can influence performance but are not what you are trying to measure. Here, I…

Information literacy (IL) is generally accepted as an important learning competency in undergraduate education and is directly and indirectly mentioned in many national accrediting bodies' standards. While information literacy has been seen as the sole domain of librarians, research shows that disciplinary faculty believe it is important and teach…

Undergraduates report a variety of reasons for not reading assigned text(s), including confusion regarding instructors' expectations, while faculty report using reading as a major instructional tool and attest to the negative consequences of students' lack of reading. To bridge this divide, we propose Task-Oriented Reading Instruction (TORI) as a…

Community college students are more likely than their peers in four-year colleges to experience homelessness or housing instability. At the same time, homelessness is a curricular topic, particularly in social science courses. Given the prevalence of homelessness and housing instability in the community college student population, likely worsened…

A majority of American adults value the role that art plays in education at the K-12 level. However, the potential benefits of arts-based, kinesthetic learning activities have not been well-documented at the college level. Twenty-three undergraduate students participated in passive learning, traditional active learning activities and arts-based…

Reflective essays have become common in higher education, especially for modules and programmes focused on the development of practical skills. This paper analyses the efficacy of reflective essays specifically for social research methods education and training. In order to do so, a thematic analysis of qualitative survey data from undergraduate…