Despite its growing use at the K-12 level, standards-based grading (alignment of grading to course standards) has been comparatively neglected in higher education. College students are often confronted with grading practices that reflect subjective, non-standardized formats incorporating a blend of academic and non-academic components. This case…

Centrifugation is a major unit operation in chemical and biotechnology industries. Here we present a simple, hands-on laboratory experiment to teach the basic principles of centrifugation and to explore the shear effects of centrifugation using bacterial cells as model particles. This experiment provides training in the use of a bench-top…

This paper explores the complex relationship between environmental education and researcher activism from the perspective of transgressive learning. With increasing interest within academia for more radical learning-based transformations for confronting sustainability challenges, come calls for more instrumental warrior stances in methodologies…

There has been a good deal of research into the problems Chinese postgraduate students studying in English-speaking universities face with regard to critical thinking. This project is an attempt to tackle this issue from a new perspective. It aims to explore how a unique aspect of the university curriculum in China--the so-called "four…

Teaching the general psychology course provides instructors with the opportunity to invite students to explore the dynamics of behavior and mental processes through the lens of theory and research. Three innovative writing assignments were developed to teach students to think like a psychologist, operationalized as enhancing critical thinking,…

This expository article explores the challenges college sophomores face in making academic decisions and choosing a major. We conduct a literature review and discuss the findings from previously conducted empirical studies as a foundation for this exploration and identify implications for college counselors serving this student population. We also…

Educators need to reflect critically on their instruction to continue to be effective. This paper will employ case studies to demonstrate how librarians can improve their teaching by applying critical reflection and action research to their information literacy (IL) sessions. The four lenses model of Stephen Brookfield, an adult education expert,…

In their transition to college, students often struggle to identify and make connections between the main arguments, evidence, and empirical findings of articles from academic journals commonly assigned on political science syllabi. Which active learning techniques are most effective for teaching students to recognize and evaluate social science…

This article explores the process and outcomes of teaching critical reflection to social work students in an Australian university, based on our experience with teaching critical reflection. The application by students of a particular model of critical reflection to their learning experiences during field education placements is described and…

Art education in Hong Kong has undergone various changes in response to educational reform. In art assessment, a major change in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary (NSS) Curriculum is the inclusion of art criticism as a compulsory component of the new public examination. Assessing students' abilities to interpret art in an art criticism public…

In the current culture of regulation in higher education and, in turn, the history discipline, it is timely to problematize discipline standards in relation to student agency and creativity. This article argues that through the inclusion of a critical orientation and engaged pedagogy, historians have the opportunity to bring a more agentic…

Many college students are not progressing in the development of their critical thinking skills. Concept mapping is a technique for facilitating validation of one's critical thinking by graphically depicting the structure of complex concepts. Each of our three studies of concept mapping involved approximately 240 students enrolled in four sections…

This qualitative study explores undergraduate critical-thinking development from the perspective of students, faculty, and academic affairs administrators. We interviewed three different student cohorts at the end of both the first and second semesters of their first year at a selective liberal arts university in south/central Texas. We also…

Creating successful students beyond the classroom means creating students that are confident, independent, lifelong learners who engage in the world around them. By giving students time to learn, constructing meaningful tasks, and teaching them how to become learners, educators can foster important skill sets that motivate students to learn and…

This article describes a modular set of activities based on television news for teaching French language, cultural knowledge, and intercultural capability. The latter term echoes Lantolf and Poehner's symbolic capability (2007), a teaching and learning goal that the author considers more holistic and feasible than the more commonly used term…