In the UK, there is great concern about the perceived increase in plagiarized work being submitted by students in higher educations. Although there is much debate, the reasons for the perceived change are not completely clear. Here we present the results of a 2-year trial of the JISC Plagiarism Detection Service (PDS) involving hundreds of…

Teachers are hungry for strategies that will motivate their students to engage in reading and writing. One promising method is the Authoring With Video (AWV) approach, which encourages teachers to use captioning software and digital video in writing assignments. AWV builds on students' fascination with television and video but removes the audio…

Online education is particularly well suited to the needs of community college students. Although community colleges have lower per-unit fees than four-year colleges and universities, many community college students still experience economic hardship. Even with fee waivers, students may have problems finding the money for textbooks,…

Visual stress is the experience of unpleasant visual symptoms when engaged in reading and some other visual tasks. There is currently no objective diagnostic test for this condition, which affects a substantial proportion of the population and which can disrupt development of reading skills. The reliability of subjective reports of symptoms has…

The purpose of this study was to examine critically how family literacy is promoted and represented through the images and written texts on Web sites developed by providers of family literacy programs. Naturalistic research over the last 20 years or so demonstrates that the family is a rich site for supporting children's literacy development…

The ability to perform a laboratory experiment as a nonhands-on observer, such as in a distance education context, has been questioned by some educators who ponder whether distance education lab courses are as effective as those held in a physical laboratory environment. This article examines this issue and compares the performance of distance…

This article addresses the intersections between online education and special education in terms of instructional design. The relevant elements of online instructional design, which require particular attention when teaching students with special needs, are examined. The overall finding is that contemporary courses generally include design…

This paper reports a comparison of human and computer marking of approximately 600 essays produced by 11-year-olds in the UK. Each essay script was scored by three human markers. Scripts were also scored by the "e-rater" program. There was a good agreement between human and machine marking. Scripts with highly discrepant scores were…

The concept of "publishing" has changed again, just in the last few years, due to YouTube, Blogger, Second Life, Flickr, and other new social networking tools (John Marshall Law School, 2005). Whether they are making it possible for everyone to view a video on YouTube on how to install a hard drive on a Mac, add a collaborative student writing…

A novel ratio method is developed and automated for finding the bromine-chlorine-sulfur stoichiometry in the molecular formula of an unknown. This method is also useful in spectrometric analysis or beginning organic chemistry.

This exercise integrates the infrared unknown identification ("IR-ID") experiment common to most organic laboratory syllabi with computer molecular modeling. In this modification students are still required to identify unknown compounds from their IR spectra, but must additionally match some of the absorptions with computed frequencies they…

SDS-PAGE is a simple, rapid technique that has many uses in biochemistry and is readily adaptable to the undergraduate laboratory. It is, however, a technique prone to several types of procedural pitfalls. This article describes the use of SDS-PAGE to determine the subunit molecular mass and composition of yeast alcohol dehydrogenase employing…

The purpose of this research was to address the current and prospective views on educational technology (ET) in order to discover the difficulties and develop its utilization in Omani higher education. The main instruments used to carry out this research were two questionnaires: the faculty members' questionnaire, and the technical/administrative…

This article outlines the characteristics and problems related to edutainment and of the associated research studies demonstrating that learning outcomes looks promising. The article suggests that we are moving towards a new generation of educational use of games that is more inclusive. This new generation relies on constructivist learning…

High school teacher Cathie English believes online threaded discussions are "an amazing ally to the teacher who cares about giving voice to every student in the classroom." They offer a forum for quiet students to develop and verbalize ideas; promote in-depth response and reflection; encourage peer affirmation; and provide opportunities for more…