Purpose: Higher education environments have become increasingly competitive and institutions have to compete for students in the recruitment markets. With the introduction of student fees, it is hypothesised that potential applicants to HE will increasingly become consumerist. The research upon which this paper was based was aimed at finding out…

Purpose: This paper describes a set of recommendations that will aid universities planning to create sustainability education programs. These recommendations are not specific to curriculum or programs but are instead recommendations for academic institutions considering a shift towards "sustainability education" in the broadest sense.…

This article addresses some of the issues that surround national science education standards for Grades K-12 and presents a more general and updated introduction to national and state science standards. It also provides a brief overview of the science content standards movement in the United States, insights into the forces that have caused the…

This article describes a simple and inexpensive hands-on simulation of protein folding suitable for use in large lecture classes. This activity uses a minimum of parts, tools, and skill to simulate some of the fundamental principles of protein folding. The major concepts targeted are that proteins begin as linear polypeptides and fold to…

From classroom, to study space, to collaborative work or laboratories, students seek spatial, social, and intellectual connections, and most importantly, they seek the right space at the right time. The challenge for libraries is to provide different types of integrated spaces that balance the need to reflect and to absorb with the need to…

There has been a wealth of investigation into the use of online multiple-choice questions as a means of summative assessment, however the research into the use of formative MCQs by the same mode of delivery still remains patchy. Similarly, research and implementation has been largely concentrated within the Sciences and Medicine rather than the…

We present an approach for integrating instruction of scientific writing and reading into undergraduate science courses, inspired by the pedagogical theory of cognitive apprenticeship. We demonstrate its implementation and describe a study of students' feedback that enabled us to elicit students' difficulties and fine-tune the next application…

In this paper, a framework for the teaching of undergraduate information literacy is proposed. This framework has been developed as a major outcome of the author's PhD research into information literacy issues in general, and an aspect of literacy--information retrieval--in particular. Literature from two disciplines was reviewed as background to…

This report on the SCALE Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) Case Studies line of work provides preliminary findings about SCALE activities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison). This study focuses on the structural and behavioral dynamics influencing the implementation of the four core SCALE strategies for effecting change in…

In this report, the Commission on General Education in the 21st Century--a panel of University of California faculty and administrators--issues a call for renewed attention to general education in research universities, highlighting specific reforms for University of California campuses. In addition to analyzing the historical, institutional, and…

In 2005, the School of Property, Construction and Project Management at RMIT University, Melbourne, introduced a new curriculum format for all first year students. All students enrolling in one of the four undergraduate degrees offered by the school commenced a common first year programme. This new curriculum was adopted to provide students with a…

Calls for institutional accountability and curricular coherence suggest that faculty must collaborate more than they have in the recent past to achieve significant and ongoing curricular improvements. In the study reported here, the author and her colleagues asked members of academic departments with a reputation for ongoing curricular renewal to…

The core curriculum accompanied the development of the academic discipline with multiple names such as Kinesiology, Exercise and Sport Science, and Health and Human Performance. It provides commonalties for undergraduate majors. It is timely to renew this curriculum. Renewal involves strategic reappraisals. It may stimulate change or reaffirm the…

In this study we created an environment for peer learning, where students teach students by making oral presentations in groups about solving mathematical problems and explaining the theoretical background in mathematics, during the first year of an undergraduate engineering programme at the Norrkoping campus of the Linkoping University. In order…

The purpose of the study was to determine if student teachers' perceptions of the student teacher/cooperating teacher relationship were predictive of their decisions to enter the teaching profession. The target population of this study consisted of preservice agricultural education students at Texas A&M University. The accessible sample…