Pedagogical research over the past decade has shown that chemistry courses have high failure rates and low accessibility. The implementation of novel active-learning approaches has great potential to offset these trends. Fundamental concepts that serve as "pinch points" are ripe targets for designing innovative, gamified course materials…

There is a great deal of misinformation and stigma surrounding abortion, even though it is a common reproductive health service. Teaching about abortion encompasses many things: managing the beliefs of students and teachers; state regulations around teaching or talking about abortion in schools; available resources; and the cultural miseducation…

In this article, the author shares his fear that students will become accustomed to an educational experience that lacks joy and fun as a result of the changes made to education due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He and his teaching colleagues have noticed that when students are learning virtually, they act much more as receivers of knowledge than…

As classroom teachers, we understand the struggles students face daily, especially in mathematics. These challenges can include language barriers which may or may not be related to disabilities. We have seen students in classrooms struggle with the digital divide and limited digital access. Both language and digital access are crucial for…

Humor and fear appeals are widely employed in traditional communication for educational purposes, but their exploitation in animated pedagogical agents has been scarcely explored. We studied the use of humor and fear appeals by a three-dimensional animated pedagogical agent that taught the same procedural knowledge in four conditions: i) humor…

Human-machine communication has emerged as a new relational context of education and should become a priority for instructional scholarship in the coming years. With artificial intelligence and robots offering personalized instruction, teachers' roles may shift toward overseers who design and select machine-led instruction, monitor student…

Research has shown that students perceive their success, in even the most difficult courses, on their interactions and relationships with their instructors (Anderson, 2011; Micari & Pazos, 2012). In the online classroom, instructors run into an even greater challenge when it comes to engaging students, showing their personalities, and being…

In this article, I explore laughter as a form of multimodal play in which adolescents' engage across contexts and in various configurations. With a few recent exceptions, a focus on unscripted play is largely missing from ongoing research and discussion about the education of adolescents. Whereas the space to play has been vitally important to the…

Adult men create zines (self-publications written as alternative to commercial magazines) that advance content learning and knowledge. We describe three of these zine writers who created five zines on topics related to the disciplines of science, social studies, and English/language arts. We collected their zines, interviewed the authors, and…

The use of humour in teaching and learning can be contentious, with some authors suggesting that the efficacy of humorous materials is mediated by the culture of the student. Nevertheless, humour represents a potential vehicle for the introduction of active learning in a classroom setting, as judicious use of humour may lead to a more relaxed…

Students are accessing graduate study online in ever-increasing numbers with interactive experiences differing from those who traditionally enroll in corresponding face-to-face (F2F) classes. Soft skills such as collaboration/teamwork, communication and presentation are important to learning but difficult to practice outside the F2F environment.…

There are two major global educational trends that have changed the form and execution of humor in the classroom and in professional conferences: (1) the burgeoning instructional technology, especially PowerPoint, which can provide a vehicle for several forms of low risk humor anyone can present; and (2) the diversity of classroom demographics,…

In the research literature on interactional competence in talk among second language speakers and their coparticipants, this volume of "Pragmatics & Interaction" is the first to focus on interaction in Japanese. The chapters examine the use and development of interactional practices in a wide range of social settings, from everyday…

Video recordings of Year 11 physics lessons were analyzed to identify key features of teacher explanations. Important features of the explanations used included teachers' ability to move between qualitative and quantitative modes of discussion, attention to what students require to succeed in high stakes examinations, thoughtful use of…

In the current study, it was examined whether successful learning is related to using different types of media. We compared the comprehension of an economic concept in novices (N = 82) under three conditions: a Wikipedia article, a funny, and a serious YouTube video. The media were presented in English which is a foreign language to most of the…