Courses: Basic communication course. Objectives: Using the Ally, Advocate, Activist framework in a basic communication course will help students apply course concepts to their lives and communities. This framework helps students practice civic engagement while mastering the skills that are typically tested for assessment purposes in the basic…

The large world is made up of small places. Towns, riverbanks, bridges, neighborhoods, forests, and city blocks tell the stories of what things are and how they work. Paying attention to local places and what place-based education (PBE) can bring to global studies will give students a better understanding of the wide world. While this might seem…

Memorials and monuments represent a society's view of its own history and the conclusions we collectively wish to draw about its meaning. In America in recent years, public clashes over the presence of contested public memorials--including and especially monuments dedicated to the Confederate cause in the United States Civil War--have led to…

In 2014, a US college created a policy requiring faculty to provide trigger warnings for students. This spurred a heated debate across North America regarding the need for and efficacy of trigger warnings in classes. A content analysis of comment responses (over 1500) to 20 articles on the topic of trigger warnings from two higher education news…

The present study aims to determine how far topics of renewable energy are included in the science curricula of the middle stage in Saudi Arabia. Thus, the study adopts the analytical descriptive approach. The sample comprised the science curricula of the second middle year (two semesters). The author developed and applied a form, whose validity…

The constantly growing offering of online learning materials to students is making it more difficult to locate specific information from data pools. Personalization systems attempt to reduce this complexity through adaptive e-learning and recommendation systems. The latter are, generally, based on machine learning techniques and algorithms and…

In this paper, the author argues that a professor's academic freedom should be limited when choosing teaching methods. Currently, many professors choose teaching methods without serious consideration of whether such methods are effective at achieving the course's learning outcomes. As a matter of professional responsibility, however, professors…

Although 20 states have adopted Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), 24 other states have developed their own K-12 science standards based on the same National Research Council (NRC) Framework. Understanding what influences content standards developers, realizing the supports and impediments to implementation they foresee, and knowing their…

The following article examines the implementation and controversy that surround climate change education and the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In order to fully understand why NGSS and climate change education continue to generate significant public debate, one must examine the work of both climate advocates and…

Carnegie Units (CU) quantify the time spent by students in and out of class in terms of content engagement. The rule states that for every one hour spent in a face-to-face setting, students spend an additional two hours of study time or engagement with the material). For colleges offering both online and residential courses with the same content,…

The call to improve undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education can be answered by undergraduate faculty modifying their course content and teaching methods to generate better student outcomes. The National Geoscience Faculty Survey--administered in 2004, 2009, 2012, and 2016--provides evidence that the vast…

Instructors tell stories for pedagogical reasons, but not all classroom stories are necessarily relevant to students and their learning. This study examined how instructors tell stories in ways that students find relevant or irrelevant to their lives. Participants were 388 undergraduate students who responded to an open-ended survey asking them to…

The history of the academic discipline of communication and the subsequent departments that followed are linked in some form or fashion to the evolution of the introductory communication course. Given the prominence and continued relevance of the introductory course in the communication discipline, researchers have conducted surveys for over 60…

What can educators working to develop critical thinking (CT) in their classrooms gain from engaging with the German/Scandinavian tradition of Bildung-centred Didaktik? This article takes up the challenge of how to develop an epistemology of CT that is relational and contextual and gives students the possibility of engaging in ethical debates about…

College educators and administrators have long valued critical thinking as a desired outcome of undergraduate education for its academic, professional, and personal benefits. While researchers have found a number of instructional strategies that promote critical thinking in college, less is known about how these skills transfer to authentic…