A three unit module of inquiry, including morphological comparison, cladogram construction, and data mining has been developed to teach students the nature of experimental science. Students generate angiosperm morphological data, form cladistic hypotheses, then mine taxonomic, bioinformatic and historical data from many sources to replicate and…

Belbin team role self and observer perceptions were applied to a large cohort (145) of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences undergraduates in a module assessed through two separate group projects. Students self-selected groups for the first project; for the second, groups were more "balanced." Results show slight improvement in…

This study dwells upon communicative approach as a tool for relating reading and writing skills in early childhood education in a developing economy. The quantitative data was gathered through the use of structured questionnaires and was analysed using SPSS version 17. This study confirms that teachers in the selected early childhood education…

Culture tends to be misplaced as a secondary instructional goal in most foreign language classrooms. Although research has suggested that a strong link exists between language and culture, the problem resides in how best to teach culture in the classroom. While this problem impacts all learners, it may affect high school students more because they…

Place- and community-based education--an approach to teaching and learning that starts with the local--addresses two critical gaps in the experience of many children now growing up in the United States: contact with the natural world and contact with community. It offers a way to extend young people's attention beyond the classroom to the world as…

This article reports the results of a research study to determine the washback effect of an oral assessment system on some areas of the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The research combined quantitative and qualitative research methods within a comparative study between an experimental group and a comparison group.…

Reading is critical to children's academic and future economic success. Yet reading skills continue to lag in the upper elementary grades. One way that school districts across the country have responded to the challenge of improving students' reading skills has been to hire additional, presumably more skilled, teachers as "instructional…

A fundamental goal of teachers in public schools in British Columbia (BC) is to ensure all students of every age, through the principle of continuous learning, have an equal opportunity to develop their full capacity for artistic, cultural, emotional, intellectual, and physical growth. BC public school teachers believe that the primary purpose of…

A basic question of instructional interventions is how effective it is in promoting student learning. This paper presents a study to determine the relative efficacy of different instructional strategies by applying an educational data mining technique, learning decomposition. We use logistic regression to determine how much learning is caused by…

We propose an extension of the Teaching Machine project, called Quiz Generator, that allows instructors to produce assessment quizzes in the field of algorithm and data structures quite easily. This extension makes use of visualization techniques and is based on new features of the Teaching Machine that allow third-party visualizers to be added as…

This study examines the relationship between computer self-efficacy and intended uses of technology of student teachers (N=1094) at a teacher training institute in Singapore. Self-efficacy was assessed by three factors: Basic Teaching Skills (BTS), Advanced Teaching Skills (ATS), and Technology for Pedagogy (TP), and intended use of technology was…

According to the Quality Assurance Agency, "Assessment describes any processes that appraise an individual's knowledge, understanding, abilities or skills", and is inextricably linked to a course or programme's intended learning outcomes. It also has a fundamental effect on students' learning where it serves a variety of purposes including…

Thirty-nine normal pre-school and 48 older mentally handicapped children of similar vocabulary age were tested on a sentence comprehension test under three different presentation conditions. Results showed that presentation conditions did not affect normal children, but mentally handicapped children were adversely affected by the condition in…

Advantages and disadvantages of a test item analysis method for producing item banks are discussed with respect to different teaching methods, curriculum, and the examination system. (MP)

We experimentally investigated the effect of crib sheet construction and use on student learning and exam performance. Students expected to use their prepared crib sheets during testing; however, unexpectedly they first completed a pretest without their crib sheets. Students scored significantly better on the same questions with crib sheets…