Collaborative learning is a common teaching technique, posited to align with a constructivist approach to teaching and learning. This qualitative descriptive study explores how, if at all, faculty implementation and discussion of collaborative learning shows evidence of it as a constructivist practice. Nineteen faculty at a large public…

Purpose: Creating active learning opportunities requires building a learning culture in which the instructor plays the role of a facilitator, leaving the ultimate responsibility of learning to the student. The question, however, is whether this is happening in practice. This study aims to answer this question through instructors' perceptions of…

Communication theory can be challenging to teach in an engaging manner. The following original teaching activity suggests a way to incorporate the phenomenon of escape rooms into your theory classroom. Courses: Communication Theory, Introduction to Communication. Objectives: In this activity, students will apply the basic tenets of several…

Knowledge construction can be facilitated through different types of social interactive environment. A knowledge network environment (KN) develops a knowledge-centered network visualizing the structure of collective knowledge. A social network environment (SN) creates a people-centered network visualizing the social relationships among people.…

Questions about the social and moral importance of empathy have garnered much debate in recent years. On the one hand, critics of empathy have pointed out its susceptibility to morally troubling biases and group preferences. On the other hand, proponents of empathy maintain that empathy is a motivated response that can be trained and developed to…

When Daisy Han first encountered a Montessori classroom, she actually felt free. Free to move, free to create, free to explore, free to try, free to fail, free to be. This freedom is essential to becoming an innovator. Innovators possess an irreverence almost as big as their self-efficacy, both of which have been nurtured in an environment where…

This study adopts a robust systematic literature review (SLR) to investigate the use of mobile devices to support learning (mobile learning) in university science education. It analyses 24 high quality studies over the past decade to generate insights into contemporary mobile learning developments in relation to settings, applications and…

This article takes a conceptual approach to an issue of pedagogical relevance--the presence of "teaching and learning moments" within educational environments. We suggest sources of philosophical confusions that design patterns for the classification and creation of typologies of classroom events. We identify three foundational…

There continues to be an increase in enrollments in various computing programs at academic institutions due to many job opportunities available in the information, communication, and technology sectors. This enrollment surge has presented several challenges in many Computer Science (CS), Information Technology (IT), and Software Engineering (SE)…

The study aims to investigate the effect of homogenous and heterogeneous grouping on students' achievement and experiences of learning in a collaborative environment. A collaborative learning environment has been used as a pedagogical tool for a long time now. However, there is no clarity on which grouping strategy to use. In this paper, we study…

A pilot experiment was developed in a Biomedical Sciences curricular unit to test how using a different knowledge-sharing method (World Café) in a Space for Active Learning and Teaching would affect students' engagement. Each working group was asked to prepare a poster summarising a different topic about the physiology of the oocyte. On the…

In the last decade, game-based learning has received growing attention in educational contexts in general and science education in particular. A recent game trend, which has also found its way into STEM classrooms, is escape rooms. In this type of game, players have to work through several puzzles to achieve a specific goal (mostly to escape from…

While effective interaction is the most important element of any learning environment, its importance in e-learning has been often ignored. As a result, many e-learning environments suffer from lack of impactful interactions, leading to diminished student engagement. This study aims to address this gap by investigating methods to optimise…

This review article focuses on use of an escape room as a didactic tool in teaching and learning, as identified in empirical studies that have examined the use of escape rooms in educational contexts. The review studied the methods used to study escape rooms, what the focus of attention was, what the reported use was, and implications this has for…

The design of a school's physical space can improve student climate, influencing not only teachers' work, but also students' learning experiences. This evaluative case study of a rural U.S. school district's reform efforts was theoretically grounded in a four-dimensional school climate model. The author conducted an inductive thematic analysis of…