The 12 Favorite Assignments featured in this article were presented at the 2011 Annual Convention of the Association for Business Communication (ABC), Montreal, Canada. A variety of learning objectives are featured: delivering bad news, handling difficult people, persuasion, reporting financial analysis, electronic media, face-to-face…

This case study of a Native American high school senior focuses on one of the final assignments he completed before dropping out of school early in the school year. The task was to draw a life map--a nonverbal text that identified 10 key life events on his journey to that point--as part of a larger unit on identity for his senior English class.…

There is mounting evidence to show that engineers need more than technical skills to succeed in industry. This paper describes a curriculum innovation in which so-called "soft" skills, specifically inter-personal and intra-personal skills, were integrated into a final year mining engineering course. The instructional approach was…

Manycore systems have emerged as being one of the dominant architectural trends in next-generation computer systems. These highly parallel systems are expected to be interconnected via packet-based networks-on-chip (NoC). The complexity of such systems poses novel and exciting challenges in academia, as teaching their design requires the students…

Peer assessment of long written tasks poses particular problems as these tasks typically involve complex learning and solving ill-structured problems which require divergent responses. Marking reliability of this kind of writing task is difficult to achieve. The author illustrates this through an evaluation of two implementations of peer…

In October, Myanmar's pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, got a quirky request on YouTube. A hyperactive instructor in a plaid jacket posted a video inviting her to do a Skype interview with his "World Regions" geography class at Virginia Tech. Ms. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate often compared to Nelson Mandela, might have…

This article examines the effectiveness of a collaborative group learning project for teaching a core competency in comparative politics: constitutional structures. We use a quasi-experimental design and propensity score matching to assess the value of a constitutional writing group project and presentation. The results provide strong evidence…

Organic chemistry is a traditionally difficult subject with high failure & withdrawal rates and many areas of conceptual difficulty for students. To promote student learning and success, four undergraduate organic chemistry and spectroscopy courses at the first to third year level (17-420 students) were "flipped" in 2013-2014. In the…

What is the best way to assign graduate business students to online team-based projects? Team assignments are frequently made on the basis of alphabet, time zones or previous performance. This study reviews personality as an indicator of student online team performance. The personality assessment IDE (Insights Discovery Evaluator) was administered…

The study investigated the learner perceptions of a CALL component in a blended language learning context. 52 Taiwanese college students attended instructional classroom sessions and did weekly online assignments in the form of interactive web-based exercises over one semester. Their learning performance was measured by means of two computer-based…

Much research supports the everyday therapeutic and deeper social-neurophysiological influence of singing songs alone and in groups (Austin, 2008; Cozolino, 2013; Sacks, 2007). This study looks at what happens when Japanese students teach short English affirmation songlet-routines to others out of the classroom (clandestine folk music therapy). I…

Writing has an important role in science education and practice. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary collaboration between English rhetoric studies and biology, seemingly disparate disciplines, we describe a model for a scientific writing and communication course. The goals of the course were to prepare students for science-oriented careers, as well…

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to help pre-service teachers experience and evaluate the potential of Second Life, a three-dimensional immersive virtual environment, for potential integration into their future teaching. By completing collaborative assignments in Second Life, nineteen pre-service general education teachers explored an…

Effective use of outside source texts is one of the key components of successful academic writing. This study aims at clarifying Japanese university EFL students' citation behaviors in producing argumentative writing. Twenty-six Japanese university EFL students wrote an argumentative essay. Their essays were analyzed quantitatively by six…

This paper presents the results of a one-year longitudinal study which sought to investigate the effect that strategy instruction may have on English language achievement. Two classes of junior high school students at Madina in Ghana were involved in an experiment. The experimental class was taught various language-learner strategies both…