This article explores the use of student written cases as a teaching method to improve students' capacity to integrate theory with practice. The article begins with a brief history of the case method and its effectiveness in teaching students valuable skills in assessment and problem solving. A discussion then follows on case writing and the…

A critical service-learning pedagogy links service-learning and social justice education by engaging students in meaningful service in the community and integrating that experience with thoughtful introduction, analysis, and discussion of issues important to understanding social justice. The Citizen Scholars Program is a unique four semester…

The peaceful quiet that often accompanies the warming of a mid-April morning in a rural/suburban school district outside Philadelphia was broken harshly when several alarmed high school students arrived at school with Neo-Nazi flyers. The flyers were designed to recruit new members into a hate group calling itself the Pottstown SS. In addition,…

This article communicates findings from a year-long constructivist teaching experiment about the relationship between four sixth-grade students' multiplicative structures and their construction of improper fractions. Students' multiplicative structures are the units coordinations that they can take as given prior to activity--i.e., the units…

This paper reports the development of innovative assessment sessions within two core technical courses in Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland. Peer Assessment Learning Sessions (PALS) facilitate a student's peer assessment of a colleague's problem-based learning assignment or tutorial within a "traditional" whole-class…

The authors use proven cognitive and learning principles and recent developments in the field of educational psychology to teach the concept of the sampling distribution of the mean, which is arguably one of the most central concepts in inferential statistics. The proposed pedagogical approach relies on cognitive load, contiguity, and experiential…

Metaphors were used to teach systems thinking and to clarify concepts of organizational theory in an introductory MBA management course. Gareth Morgan's metaphors of organization were read by students and applied as frames to analyze a business case. In addition, personal metaphors were written by individual students in order to describe the…

The author argues for a rational method to analyze behavior problems and proposes a method of identifying the problem, the objectives to be achieved, the solution, the implementation, and the evaluation (IOSIE) as a practical approach to assist teachers in resolving most classroom behavior management problems. The approach draws heavily on…

Project-based learning is not a new idea. It has a solid track record of increasing student motivation and improving students' problem-solving and higher-order thinking skills (Stites, 1998; Thomas, 2000). In the traditional model, students work in teams to investigate open-ended questions and apply their knowledge through culminating products or…

Students get excited about science when they investigate real scientific problems in the classroom, especially when the investigation extends over several weeks. This article describes a health-science problem-based learning (PBL) investigation that a group of teachers and teacher educators devised together for a group of fourth- to sixth-grade…

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2000) recommends that students at all grade levels be provided with instructional programs that enable them to "create and use representations to organize, record, and communicate mathematical ideas; select, apply, and translate among mathematical representations to solve problems; and use…

This paper concerns computer aided assessment (CAA) of mathematics in which a computer algebra system (CAS) is used to help assess students' responses to elementary algebra questions. Using a methodology of documentary analysis, we examine what is taught in elementary algebra. The STACK CAA system, http://www.stack.bham.ac.uk/, which uses the CAS…

Encouraging students to share and compare solution methods is a key component of reform efforts in mathematics, and comparison is emerging as a fundamental learning mechanism. To experimentally evaluate the effects of comparison for mathematics learning, the authors randomly assigned 70 seventh-grade students to learn about algebra equation…

This article advocates an approach to supporting students who experience difficulties in learning, irrespective of nosology, particularly in the key areas of literacy and numeracy. In the state of Queensland, Australia, a distinction has been made between students' experiencing learning difficulties and those who have learning disabilities (LD).…

The teaching of mathematics in Australian schools has received considerable attention over the past decade. States and territories have designed and implemented new mathematics syllabi, and education sectors have supported teachers through sustained professional learning initiatives. Whereas the major focus of these initiatives has been on…