This study examined some of the methodological approaches used by students to construct causal maps in order to determine which approaches help students understand the underlying causes and causal mechanisms in a complex system. This study tested the relationship between causal understanding (ratio of root causes correctly/incorrectly identified,…

Introduction: Electronic knowledge resources have the potential to rapidly provide answers to clinicians' questions. We sought to determine clinicians' reasons for searching these resources, the rate of finding relevant information, and the perceived clinical impact of the information they retrieved. Methods: We asked general internists, family…

The current studies investigated the efficient use of dialogue in intelligent tutoring systems that use natural language interaction. Such dialogues can be relatively time-consuming. This work addresses the question of how much dialogue is needed to produce significant learning gains. In Experiment 1, a full dialogue condition and a read-only…

This paper investigates how features in students' everyday life influence their participation in online global collaboration, and it suggests that students' local context should be recognised as a significant part of their educational space. In this exploratory case study of students engaged in a global online master's programme, the discussion is…

Bullying between students at school can seriously affect students' health and academic outcomes. To date, little is known regarding the extent to which bullying behaviour is clustered within certain schools rather than similarly prevalent across all schools. Additionally, studies of bullying behaviour in schools that do not account for clustering…

Since its inception at Harvard in 2004, the social network, Facebook, has grown dramatically and spread across the globe. It will soon have 1 billion users and is now operative in over 75 languages. A large percentage of undergraduates are now active on Facebook. Much of the recent literature on Facebook focuses on business applications and how it…

In this article we address several issues and challenges that the evaluation of writing presents individual instructors and composition programs as a whole. We present electronic distributed evaluation, or EDE, as an emerging model for feedback on student writing and describe how it was integrated into our program's course redesign. Because the…

Limited-residency and online doctoral programs have an attrition rate significantly higher than traditional programs. This grounded-theory study focused on issues pertaining to communication between students, their peers and faculty and how interpersonal communication may affect persistence. Data were collected from 17 students actively working on…

This paper proposes a generic methodology and architecture for developing a novel conversational intelligent tutoring system (CITS) called Oscar that leads a tutoring conversation and dynamically predicts and adapts to a student's learning style. Oscar aims to mimic a human tutor by implicitly modelling the learning style during tutoring, and…

Challenging student behaviors are a prominent factor in the development of teacher stress and burnout. When classroom-based teachers of preschool children with disabilities were surveyed to identify their training needs in one North Carolina county, the most frequent request was how to address behavior challenges of preschool children with…

The present study reports on action research conducted using a resource wiki. Participants included 48 certified teachers and pre-service teachers enrolled in a face-to-face graduate course supplemented with online activities. Data collected include student reflections that indicate the use of a wiki at the university level is a feasible means of…

Institutions of higher learning are increasingly asked to defend curricular and pedagogical outcomes. Faculty must demonstrate that simulations are productive tools for learning, but a review of the literature shows that the evidence of their effectiveness is inconclusive, despite their popularity in the classroom. Simulations may in fact help…

Design thinking is about using design to improve the human experience. It combines collaboration, systems thinking, and a balance of creative and analytical habits. It also fuels what the students want for themselves: making an impact on the real world in real time and having adults take their passions seriously. The process essentially comes down…

So far, the existence of a virtual community forum has become a reality and social necessity in an era cybertech. It was also viewed as the electronic frontier of 21st century society that was undoubtedly for reorganizing and redefining to awareness of human being, that ways of their perceptions and explorations no longer limited by time, space,…

Like many other industries, private tutoring is now being transformed by the growth of information and communication technologies (ICT). An increasing number of educational entrepreneurs in different countries are incorporating Internet tools in their professional practice. While the popularity of online tutoring in countries with widespread…