The purpose of study was to explore the change process described in "The Shack" using Mezirow's (1997) phases of meaning-making in transformational learning. Results suggest that transformational learning is a useful lens for examining the individual change process in the novel, and offers teaching opportunities in classes that explore personal…

This article makes the case for a new framing of liberal education based on several decades of research emerging from the learning and developmental sciences. This work suggests that general knowledge stems from acquiring both the habits of mind and repertoires of practice that develop from participation in knowledge-building communities. Such…

Although many cite the No Child Left Behind Act ([NCLB], 2002) as the first result of public outcry for accountability in American education, evidence of this change can be traced back more than three decades, to the Reagan administration and "A Nation at Risk" (National Commission on Excellence in Education [NCEE], 1983). This…

Popper's theory of learning is sometimes met with incredulity because Popper claims that there is no transference of knowledge or knowledge elements from outside the individual, neither from the physical environment nor from others. Instead, he claims that we can improve our present theories by discovering their inadequacies. The intent of this…

Clinical placements for senior nursing students enrolled in leadership courses are vital to student learning and to the preparation of new graduates. Schools of nursing are struggling with issues of access and availability of adequate clinical experiences for student learning. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the quality and availability…

This study of empirical research investigates four specific questions on blended instruction: Is there compatibility of blended instruction with accepted learning constructs? Should there be any consideration of program audience that are better suited for this teaching method? and Is there evidence on the effectiveness of the pedagogy of blended…

We report on some results from a multiyear development of new techniques and materials for teaching linear algebra. Our goals were to (a) to create a professional learning community across STEM disciplines, (b) to combine expertise in content and pedagogy in designing effective instructional practice, and (c) to use learning theories to support…

This paper details a framework for evaluating the potential of particular forms of technology for supporting student engagement with mathematics. I propose that, focusing on the strength of affordances to engage in particular ways allows us to begin to build an analytic frame that serves two purposes: (1) to begin to document learning as an…

The Clark and Estes (2008) Gap Analysis Process Model (Gap Analysis) was used to examine the reasons 33% of freshmen students do not participate in the Burke School of Business, Business Abroad Experience (BAE) program at New Wave University (NWU). The purpose of this study was to understand the considerations students make in their…

The study on which this article is based investigated reasons for learning a foreign language at university in a predominantly English-speaking environment (the UK). It examined the relative importance of motivational variables as theorised in the field of second language (L2) motivation, and the effect of first language (L1) and linguistic…

The central goal of this study was to characterize major patterns of reasoning exhibited by college chemistry students when analyzing and interpreting chemical data. Using a case study approach, we investigated how a representative student used chemical models to explain patterns in the data based on structure-property relationships. Our results…

A long history of laboratory and field experiments have demonstrated that dividing study time into many sessions is often superior to massing study time into few sessions, a phenomenon known as the "spacing effect." We use this well-established finding from the psychology literature as inspiration for investigating how students…

In Miyamoto et al. (2015, this issue) the authors looked to substantiate the presence of the spacing effect, referenced from the psychology literature, in several MOOCs. Their secondary analyses constituted a robust, empirical finding on the correspondence between session distribution and certification but with only a coarse, analogous…

This article describes student responses to a BSW research course framed by experiential learning theory to engage the community and offer applied research practice. The study finds that students generally express overall satisfaction with the research course and describe perceptions of learning gains when involved in a team-based research project…

We assessed the impact of expert students' instructional quality on the academic performance of novice students in 12th-grade physics classes organized in an expert model of cooperative learning ("jigsaw classroom"). The instructional quality of 129 expert students was measured by a newly developed rating system. As expected, when…