Spices, of course, do not make a meal, but they make a meal more enjoyable and memorable. Games do the same, allowing teachers to interact with their students in a different way than they normally do. They also have the potential to challenge and assess students' understanding of content. Games allow teachers to "play" with their…

Intelligence typically is defined as consisting of "adaptation to the environment" or in related terms. Yet, it is not clear that "general intelligence" or g, traditionally conceptualized in terms of a general factor in a psychometrically-based hierarchical model of intelligence, provides an optimal way of defining intelligence…

Only knowledge is not sufficient to make students succeed in the world. Students need to attain 21st century skills like problem-solving, creativity, innovation, metacognition, communication etc. to endure in the modern world. Problem-solving skill is one of the fundamental human cognitive processes. Whenever students face a situation where they…

Teaching effectiveness in higher education is challenging. Given the number of stakeholders and the reasons for assessing teaching effectiveness creates additional challenges. Yet when tying teaching effectiveness to successful student learning outcomes and combining those interests to a case study project, the views of faculty, administrators,…

For decades, social mobility has been the focus of governments across the political spectrum. But despite wide-ranging support for action, social mobility in Britain remains low, with poor performance across several social mobility measures, nationally and internationally. And although politicians have long referenced the ideas and issues…

Student support is a key focus within the widening participation agenda, as effective support enhances retention and success. However, student support is not well defined in higher education, which is problematic as it is difficult to measure success if stakeholders have different definitions. Without clear boundaries in student support, educators…

Emergent programs or newly established areas of study are often viewed as interdisciplinary. But how is interdisciplinarity defined or measured? The identification of research methods and the selection of objects of inquiry are significant elements in this definition. Citation analysis, however, also plays a role. Citation patterns in master's…

Students in many courses are commonly expected to learn declarative concepts, which are abstract concepts denoted by key terms with short definitions that can be applied to a variety of scenarios as reported by Rawson et al. ("Educational Psychology Review" 27:483-504, 2015). Given that declarative concepts are common and foundational in…

Close reading requires students to unpack the implicit relationships within and across sentences. The authors discuss three potential barriers to comprehension embedded within text that they have seen with their own students and with the teachers they have worked with: anaphoric relationships, connectives, and appositives. The authors begin each…

The present paper focuses on the regulations on private supplementary tutoring, which in China is widely called "Xiaowai Peixun." Although much previous international literature has mostly focused on tutoring in academic subjects, tutoring in non-academic ones such as piano and painting has become popular in China and is also seen as…

The terms "outcome" and "impact" are ubiquitous in evaluation discourse. However, there are many competing definitions that lack clarity and consistency and sometimes represent fundamentally different meanings. This leads to profound confusion, undermines efforts to improve learning and accountability, and represents a…

Research design is a critical topic that is central to research studies in science, social science, and many other disciplines. After identifying the research topic and formulating questions, selecting the appropriate design is perhaps the most important decision a researcher makes. Currently, there is a plethora of literature presenting multiple…

Human beings live in a social world and interaction is at the heart of human society with language being the tool for this interaction and communication. In a world marked by globalization and global communication, there is a deeply-felt need for mutual understanding among people of diverse cultures and languages. In the absence of a common…

Media literacy has become a center of gravity for countering fake news, and a diverse array of stakeholders--from educators to legislators, philanthropists to technologists--have pushed significant resources toward media literacy programs. Media literacy, however, cannot be treated as a panacea. This paper provides a foundation for evaluating…

The aim of this paper is to offer a timely theory of education that abstains as much as feasibly possible from 'taking sides' in current ideological disputes. It begins by presenting a basic definition demarcating the concept of 'education' from other processes of human learning and formation, yet in a way that allows circumventing various…