Teachers play a crucial role in helping students develop the skills needed for success in school, career, and life. These skills--which are a focus in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)--include higher-order thinking and complex literacy skills, such as reading, writing, and citing evidence from texts. Professional development (PD) can…

Amidst the milieu of free and at-cost L2 language software applications coming into existence for use on mobile devices and computers, adult L2 learners are faced with the challenge of selecting their best choice for them to use in acquiring a specific second language. Their selection is based on their individual need and the context in which they…

Team assessment has been suggested as a competency-based collaborative learning technique. Critical to the success of an assessment for learning, in competency-based education, is the use of formative feedback. This study reports on the development of, and the students' experience of, a Team Assessment with Immediate Feedback (TAIF), in which…

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is often governed by predefined communicative functions and rules within a specific domain. Radio communication between pilots and Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs) is one such domain. Mandatory plain language testing, introduced in this domain in 2008, whilst clearly laudable in its safety related objectives, has…

The business world today values collaboration and team work skills such as those found in the area of project management, business process reengineering, quality circles, etc. In response, the use of group projects permeates many curricula today with varying consequences and levels of success. Technology claims to enhance collaboration in…

Recent research in public administration on governance, networks, and deliberative democracy, has highlighted the need to develop a skill set in graduates of Public Administration programs that prepares them for the interpersonal and relational challenges of the policy process. The skills needed to manage in increasingly complex and networked…

With rigor outlined in state and Common Core standards and the addition of constructed-response test items to most state tests, math constructed-response questions have become increasingly popular in today's classroom. Although constructed-response problems can present a challenge for students, they do offer a glimpse of students' learning through…

At Stellenbosch University there is a drive to integrate the development of graduate attributes and the use of emerging technologies in the curriculum. With the aim of discovering the role of emerging mobile technologies in learning a qualitative research project was undertaken with a senior-student cohort. An inductive thematic analysis was done…

A withdrawal design study evaluated the effectiveness of using constant time delay to teach six adults with a developmental disability to program and use an iPod touch® as an electronic photographic activity schedule (ePAS). The ePAS, created with the First Then Visual Schedule app, consisted of photographs of different exercises to complete…

The current study aimed to identify the impact of video modeling upon teaching three pupils with Down syndrome the skill of preparing a simple meal (sandwich), where the training was conducted in a separate classroom in schools of normal students. The training consisted of (i) watching the video of an intellectually disabled pupil, who is…

Correct grammar is important for precise, accurate, academic prose, but the traditional skills-based approach to teaching grammar is not effective if the goal is good writing. The sentence-combining approach shows promise. However, sentence modeling is more likely to produce strong writing and enhance reading comprehension. Through sentence…

This was a quasi-experimental study that examined two Project-Based Learning (PjBL) environments to determine the impact PjBL has on the changing perceptions of 21st century soft skills, and students' intrinsic motivation. Further, researchers were interested in evaluating the difference in results between an interdisciplinary PjBL experience and…

Reasoning in mathematics plays a critical role in developing mathematical understandings. In this article, Bragg, Loong, Widjaja, Vale & Herbert explore an adaptation of the Magic V Task and how it was used in several classrooms to promote and develop reasoning skills.

Early in my teaching career, my goals were to teach students to play their instruments beautifully and to help them correctly and independently interpret music notation. However, many of my students were missing the internal musicianship skills that enable high-level music-making. As we teach instrument technique and notation, we sometimes…

Undergraduate computer science students need to learn analytical reasoning skills to develop high-quality software and to understand why the software they develop works as specified. To accomplish this central educational objective, this article describes a systematic process of introducing reasoning skills into the curriculum and assessing how…