Background: When well-designed and implemented, cluster randomized trials can meet the high standards federal agencies and other funders increasingly require for evidence on the effectiveness of school health programs and services. However, designing and implementing these studies can present more challenges than at first appears. Methods: I…

In engineering, teachers can push even the youngest learners to think critically and create something that reflects the function of the real thing. When children create, they often make a representation of something--a crayon-drawn stick-figure family or a butterfly life cycle represented with pasta--that is based on appearance. Their questions…

How do people come to think of themselves as instructional designers? This is partly a matter of acquiring expertise, e.g., the knowledge and skill sets found in professional standards, e.g., those of IBSTPI or AECT. But identity also involves adoption of new professional roles and affiliation and active engagement with professional communities.…

Current problem-solving research has advanced our understanding of the problem-solving process but has provided little advice on how to teach problem-solving skills. In addition, literature reveals that individual difference is an essential issue in problem-solving skills instruction but has been rarely addressed in current research. Building upon…

A learning analytics dashboard enables teachers and students to monitor and reflect on their online teaching and learning patterns. This study was a review of prior studies on learning analytics dashboards to show the need to develop an instrument for measuring dashboard success. An early version of the instrument based on the framework of…

This review addresses a lacuna in the literature concerning interdisciplinary teaching by analyzing peer-reviewed articles that discuss empirical evidence of interdisciplinary teaching practices. The article reports on the wide array of purposes, approaches and designs of interdisciplinary teaching and learning found in the review, but an…

Everyday experience and a growing part of empirical research illustrate the changing reality of reading in our society in recent years. There are many empirical, pedagogical and philosophical studies that reflect on the falling level of general knowledge of the population and the superficiality of young people's reading comprehension. In this…

At first glance, scientific laboratory experiences might appear to be challenging to move to the cloud. Skeptics may point to sensory feedback limitations and inequivalence of student outcomes. However, emerging data increasingly provide evidence that scientific laboratory courses are not only amenable to online learning, but also can deliver…

Tacit knowledge, intuitive responses, empirical research -- how can design elevate itself as a discipline when its main forms of knowledge gathering and generation are still believed to be less valuable than those in traditional academia? Beginning design students must learn to put words to their actions, to understand their processes and to be…

While design-based pedagogies have increasingly been emphasized, the assessment of design projects remains difficult due to the large number of potentially "correct" solutions. Adaptive comparative judgment (ACJ), an approach based on assessors/judges working through a series of paired comparisons and selecting the better of two items,…

Using the online Scopus database, we retrieved all instructional design and technology (IDT) scholarship between 2007 and 2017 across 65 journals. In this paper, we analyzed the research and trends in this corpus of IDT scholarship and investigated the top cited papers, keywords, authors, publishing countries and publishing universities. We also…

Typical approaches to assessing students' understanding of the engineering design process (EDP) include performance assessments that are time-consuming to score. It is also possible to use multiple-choice (MC) items to assess the EDP, but researchers and practitioners often view the diagnostic value of this assessment format as limited. However,…

This study examines users' perceptions of an online course design checklist. We created the Online Course Design Checklist (OCDC) to help highlight very basic criteria that may improve the quality of online courses. The OCDC highlights criteria that should not be ignored during online course development. It is based on components of established…

There is a lack of research and practice focused on how to foster higher-order processing, such as creative performance, within higher education settings. To address this gap in research, we chose to study pedagogical practices in schools of art and design, where one of the intended learning outcomes is creativity. Based upon data gathered as part…

With increasing demand for improved medical equipment and healthcare, next-generation biomedical engineers need strong design skills. Equipping biomedical engineering students with tools for idea generation and development can increase student design success. Design Heuristics are an ideation tool developed through empirical studies of product…