How can museums and other informal learning institutions cultivate greater civic engagement among the visiting public around important social issues? This case study of the National Network of Ocean and Climate Change Interpreters' (NNOCCI) professional learning community illustrates how insights from the social sciences can be productively…

This mini-article outlines a continuum of collaboration for faculty within a department of the same discipline. The goal of illustrating this continuum is showcase different stages of collaboration so that faculty members can assess where they are as a collective and consider steps to collaborate more. The separate points along a continuum of…

The higher education literature reveals the highly subjective nature of thinking about the roles of higher education and its teachers with respect to "education for sustainability". We used Q methodology to help to clarify and categorise commonly held viewpoints about this complex issue held by teachers in one university in New Zealand.…

This article explores a multidisciplinary lesson on nanotechnology that can provide an effective means for teaching about both STEM and social studies topics. This approach encourages students to consider the "role that science and technology play in our lives and in our cultures." The extraordinary promise of nanotechnology, however, is…

As an educator, it is always interesting to learn and employ new and creative ways of thinking and methods in teaching. However, the application of these new ideas in our classrooms needs more examination for better ways of implementation. Since the postmodernist theory and approaches have been practiced in education in the past few decades, the…

Over the past 40 years, the assessment and scientific study of capacity in older adults has emerged as a distinct field of clinical and research activity for psychologists. This new field reflects the convergence of several trends: the aging of American society, the growing incidence and prevalence of dementia, and the patient rights,…

Establishing a Transactive Memory System (TMS) is essential for groups of learners, when they are multidisciplinary and collaborate online. Environments for Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) could be designed to facilitate the TMS. This study investigates how various aspects of a TMS (i.e., specialization, coordination, and trust)…

Experience developing multidisciplinary bachelor's and master's curricula involving intertwined chemistry, informatics, and librarianship-editorship skills is described. The bachelor's curriculum was created in close cooperation of academic staff, library staff, and the publishing house staff (Institute of Chemical Technology Prague: a sole…

The following pages present an account of practices developed at the University of Dayton, a Catholic university in the Marianist tradition, to help faculty more intentionally integrate liberal learning and business education by focusing on ways the Catholic Intellectual Tradition can shape the context in which this integration takes place. The…

In this paper, the authors describe how two institutions are helping their undergraduate biology students build quantitative competencies. Incorporation of quantitative skills and reasoning in biology are framed through a discussion of two cases that both concern introductory biology courses, but differ in the complexity of the mathematics and the…

Twenty-first-century biology is inherently interdisciplinary. Every aspect of biology, from molecules to organisms to ecosystems, is richly informed by the physical, mathematical, and computational sciences. It is both an exciting and daunting time for biology educators--exciting because of the vast opportunity for important new discoveries that…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the use of a middle school flexible interdisciplinary block schedule would increase eighth-grade students' reading scores, as measured by the Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (OAKS). A 90-minute middle school flexible interdisciplinary block schedule served as the independent variable and…

Researchers from MDRC and Johns Hopkins University partnered with Florida's Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) in 2009 to launch an independent evaluation of the district's initiative to implement Ninth Grade Academies (NGAs) in every district high school. An NGA is a self-contained learning community for ninth-graders that operates as a school…

In a new era of Common Core State Standards (CCSS), teachers are expected to provide more rigorous, coherent, and focused curriculum at every grade level. To respond to the call for higher expectations across the curriculum and certainly within reading, writing, and mathematics, educators should work closely together to create mathematically…

Ecological ideas have been manifested in diverse ways in American high schools since the early twentieth century. Core scientific concepts in ecology--the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment--include adaptations, plant succession, ecosystem ecology, and population ecology. This dissertation argues, however, that there…