Measuring students' conceptual understandings has become increasingly important to biology faculty members involved in evaluating and improving departmental programs. We developed the Molecular Biology Capstone Assessment (MBCA) to gauge comprehension of fundamental concepts in molecular and cell biology and the ability to apply these concepts in…

Writing intensive courses provide a means of addressing declining student writing proficiency. Programmatic learning goals accomplished through a writing-intensive course can be used to develop students' writing skills. For business communication faculty members to maximize the value of their courses to business programs, they should demonstrate…

The purpose of doctoral programs in social work is to prepare research-scientists who contribute to knowledge that guides professional practice and educators competent to teach new cohorts of social work practitioners. In grooming stewards of the profession, doctoral programs also must prepare their graduates to support the larger contemporary…

Religious Education (RE) in Greece is a compulsory school subject according the 2011 new framework for compulsory education, entitled "New School". This article focuses on two statutory documents for RE, "The Curriculum for RE" and the "The Teacher's Guide for RE", and the pilot scheme of the new curriculum running in…

Ethiopia, the second most populous country in Africa, has embarked on an aggressive mission to expand higher education opportunities for its populace during the past two decades. However, associated with this aggressive approach to increasing higher education opportunities is the dilemma that educational planners face of improving the quality of…

The strategic planning process requires considerable detail, much of which is covered in traditional literature on strategic planning. Using actual and existing strategic plans as example, we discuss aspects of strategic planning in academic settings that are often not addressed. We present a list of action items that should be considered as part…

This paper describes a small-scale research project based on workbooks designed to support independent study of proofs in a first course on abstract algebra. We discuss the lecturers' aims in designing the workbooks, and set these against a background of research on students' learning of group theory and on epistemological beliefs and study habits…

Too frequently, education reform takes a siloed view that focuses on an individual issue instead of a broader and more comprehensive perspective. For example, students' lack of access to challenging and rigorous course work and their lack of access to experienced, engaging, and effective teachers are often discussed as separate issues rather than…

This meeting summary is organized into two major sections. The first section captures the individual contribution of meeting participants, including both Institute of Education Sciences (IES) staff and the invited technical working group members. The second section captures themes that arose during the group discussions, which were organized…

The past decade has evidenced significant dialogue on faith-based campuses about the persistent gap between the increasing ethnic diversity of the student population and that of the faculty. While campus administrators and leaders acknowledge the need to address this concern through faculty development, there is a disturbing lack of successful…

A primary goal of all teacher educators is to provide preservice teachers with meaningful professional development opportunities that will help them succeed in making the transition into their own classrooms. Through these experiences, individuals develop the requisite knowledge and skills to become effective classroom leaders capable of…

In this essay, encouraged by the critical examination of mathematics education and mathematics teacher education at the Privilege and Oppression in the Mathematics Preparation of Teacher Educators Conference, the author asks the question: What do I do from a position of power and privilege to interrupt oppression and enable everyone the…

In this article the author argues that the major ills of our formal social institutions cannot be effectively addressed without abandoning the widely adopted model of planning, evaluation and accountability that focuses on the formulation and use of aims and objectives or--to use more recent parlance--targets. She provides some background…

This article addresses two main questions: (1) what is excellence and (2) should epistemic excellence be the main purpose of education? Though references to excellence have become increasingly frequent in the UK education policy, these questions are perhaps especially important in Scotland where the curriculum is explicitly "for"…

Character education has been a part of schooling in the United States since the early years of its public education system. Starting with a religious emphasis on moral development, character education eventually transformed into more secular approaches, like the values clarification model, character word-of-the-month approach, performance…