Youths' learner-generated designs, instantiated in digital practices, spaces and artifacts, are underutilized in schools. Additionally, digital media tools are often taken up in reductive ways that serve to perpetuate deficit discourses for youth from nondominant communities, rather than reflect the creativity and innovation that youth practice…

This paper reports the results of a survey study of clicker use and mathematics anxiety among students enrolled in an undergraduate calculus course during the Fall 2013 semester. Students in two large lecture sections of calculus completed surveys at the beginning and end of the course. One class used clickers, whereas the other class was taught…

Peer Instruction (PI) is an active learning pedagogical technique. PI lectures present students with a series of multiple-choice questions, which they respond to both individually and in groups. PI has been widely successful in the physical sciences and, recently, has been successfully adopted by computer science instructors in lower-division,…

This study was designed to present and discuss some results produced by a research involving the use of English subtitles of some news videos from the webiste Reuters.com (http://www.reuters.com) with pedagogical reasons in a Brazilian context (Academic English for Journalism). We have developed the research during two semesters at UNESP…

This article is a response to criticism of my book "Big Ideas for Little Kids." The main topics addressed are: Who is the audience for the book? Can people without formal philosophical training can be good facilitators of elementary school philosophy discussions? Is it important to assess attempts to teach philosophy in elementary school? Should…

Today's public relations (PR) campaigns courses give students the opportunity to research, analyze, plan, and, in many cases, execute a campaign for a real client. Even so, today's campaigns courses may leave students with a weak understanding of how PR can best partner with other tools in the communication mix, namely advertising. Educators may…

Students are exposed to many different media reports about global climate change. Movies such as "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Ice Age" are examples of instances when movie producers have sought to capture the attention of audiences by augmenting the challenges that climate change poses. Students may receive information from a wide range of media…

This paper describes how three technologies were utilised in combination to align student learning and assessment as part of a case study. Multiple choice questions (MCQs) were central to all these technologies. The peer learning technologies; Personal Response Devices (a.k.a. "Clickers") and "PeerWise"…

Social work educators are uniquely tasked with balancing content while helping students evaluate personal biases and develop ethical conduct necessary for social work professionalism. Social work education may benefit from technology like Student Response Systems (SRS) that allow educators to pose questions on sensitive topics in real time while…

Teaching population genetics provides a bridge between genetics and evolution by using examples of the mechanisms that underlie changes in allele frequencies over time. Existing methods of teaching these concepts often rely on computer simulations or hand calculations, which distract students from the material and are problematic for those with…

Weblogs or blogging may foreground audience needs for a written work and help novice authors grow in audience awareness and elicit and use audience feedback. A case study of a second-grade classroom compared students' growing audience awareness and the ways they addressed audience needs. Analysis of student written work, students' comments to…

Formative assessment has been demonstrated to result in increased student achievement across a variety of educational contexts. When using formative assessment strategies, teachers engage students in instructional tasks that allow the teacher to uncover levels of student understanding so that the teacher may change instruction accordingly. Tools…

A surge in the amount of information in the discipline of Cell Biology presents a problem to the teaching of undergraduates under time constraints. In most textbooks and during lectures, students in Singapore are often taught in a dogmatic manner where concepts and ideas are expounded to them. The students in turn passively receive the materials…

Previous research has shown that undergraduate science students learn from peer discussions of in-class clicker questions. However, the features that characterize such discussions are largely unknown, as are the instructional factors that may lead students into productive discussions. To explore these questions, we recorded and transcribed 83…

The importance of argument in science teaching is a hot topic. Educators are told "doing science" doesn't just involve following a scientific method; it involves the restructuring and refinement of ideas through negotiation and critique with other people. Understanding the importance of argument is one thing, but even for the…