In capstone business strategy courses, a large-scale simulation organized student teams into "corporations" that prepared functional and integrative deliverables. Data from 502 students supported the effectiveness of large-scale simulation in helping students recognize the importance of integrating functional knowledge and developing an…

A study examined assessments by 127 preservice teachers, formulated from portfolios of three hypothetical fifth-grade children. Most participants followed a fairly logical set of procedures, formulating criteria to evaluate the assignments and then applying them. A few made decisions not supported by the evidence, commenting on children's quality…

Focuses on "Context," a national center and network promoting the use of case materials and simulations in higher education and employment for increasing the work-readiness of graduates. Describes the main elements of the Seatons case study developed in collaboration with the Environmental Agency. (CMK)

Presents a simulation exercise that was used to teach undergraduate students about professional ethics standards. Students participate on a mock institutional review board and formulate decisions about hypothetical research projects. Summarizes three projects and discusses the students' reaction to each. (CMK)

Discusses why and how teachers use simulations to teach about the Holocaust. Asserts that simulations constitute "poor pedagogy" and oversimplify Holocaust history. Argues that firsthand accounts from Holocaust survivors, bystanders, and victims be utilized when teaching Holocaust history. Includes excerpts from victims and survivors as…

Reports on a series of exploratory studies dealing with learning in total enterprise simulations among undergraduates. Examined the validity of simulations as learning tools; measured relationships between learning about the simulation and economic performance in the game; and explored whether some players learn more than others from the same…

The Pediatric Volitional Questionnaire (PVQ) was used along with the Test of Playfulness (TOP) to assess 16 children with cerebral palsy who took part in a study of virtual reality play intervention. Both observational measures are designed to assess children as they are engaged in occupations in one or more environments. Virtual reality offers an…

Teamwork is widely recognised as an important skill both generally and in the context of the computing industry. The majority of approaches to teaching teamwork are "practically" based and in higher education are often designed to run over a number of weeks. We required an approach that would work over a concentrated period of five days…

Students learn best when they interact with new information on a personal level. It is a challenge for teachers to tightly align student experiences with the standards assessed on high-stakes tests. To achieve this goal in social studies, the author has turned increasingly to simulations where students find such activities engaging, and their…

In this article, we will describe the results of a study of 6th grade students learning about the mathematics of change. The students in this study worked with software environments for the computer and the graphing calculator that included a simulation of a moving elevator, linked to a graph of its velocity vs. time. We will describe how the…

In this article, we describe a demonstration and discussion of an initial family therapy interview simulated by 4 student volunteers. Several concepts and principles fundamental to family therapy are illustrated: interview stages, one-person definition of a problem, systemic perspective, clear generation line, unified executive team, disengaged…

Cook School District is a Web-based simulation designed to allow teacher candidates an opportunity to explore connections between their actions as teachers and the learning and engagement of simulated students. The simulation provides a setting in which to practice the processes inherent in teacher work sample methodology (TWSM). The outcomes of…

Recent experiments have shown that placing dissimilar items on lists of phonologically similar items enhances accuracy of ordered recall of the dissimilar items [Farrell, S., & Lewandowsky, S. (2003). Dissimilar items benefit from phonological similarity in serial recall. "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition," 29,…

Microsimulation attempts to describe economic and social events by modelling the behaviour of individual agents. These models have proved useful in evaluating the impact of policy changes at the micro level. Spatial microsimulation models contain geographic information and allow for a regional or local approach to policy analysis. This paper…

Simulation and real data studies are used to investigate the value of modeling multiple-choice distractors on item response theory linking. Using the characteristic curve linking procedure for Bock's (1972) nominal response model presented by Kim and Hanson (2002), all-category linking (i.e., a linking based on all category characteristic curves…