Opportunity to learn is considered an important contributing factor in learning outcomes. In some of the latest international comparative studies of mathematics achievement, such as SIMS and TIMSS, painstaking efforts have been made to find out what the participating students' opportunities to learn mathematics had been. However, there have been…

Environmental print activities provide students' families with an integrative way to encourage reading. While in the grocery store recently, the author watched two young girls begging their mother to stop as they pointed to their "favorite" snack on the shelf. They were about five years old and probably couldn?t read yet, but they knew exactly…

This paper presents a structured environment for Computer-Supported Collaborative Argumentation, which we call the Argumentative Learning Experience (ALEX). The system aims to improve understanding of argumentation and to widen and deepen the space of debate among 16-18-year-old students. To use ALEX users make arguments by selecting and…

Higher level thought involves both critical and creative thinking skills. Although the psychological literature is rich with research on teaching critical thinking, relatively little published work addresses ways of promoting creative thinking. In this article we describe the use of poetry writing in an abnormal psychology class to encourage…

Recognizing each student's preferred learning style not only enhances the teaching and learning experience, but helps make the gymnasium a fun place to learn new skills and be physically active. This article addresses three objectives that form a pedagogical strategy with the potential to "get to know" the students in a more personal way. First,…

The need to provide alternative and exciting community service-learning experiences with university students has been a challenge to institutions of higher education. One institution was able to capitalize on an idea of integrating challenge and adventure-based activities as a form of community service. This article focuses on undergraduate…

For at least twenty years educators have wrestled with questions about the appropriate uses of computer technologies in classrooms while spending millions of dollars with neither clarity of purpose nor defined expectations. The private uses of communications technologies by children and youth leave everyone, with a different question--not whether…

This paper presents a critical appraisal of resilience and its associated concepts within the context of higher education. It addresses wide-ranging definitions of resilience, encompassing endurance and adaptability, and seeks to understand how these definitions impact on the learning experiences of students. As theoretical and empirical work on…

A unique professional development program took place for senior student affairs officers at The University of Salamanca (Spain) in June 2005. Participants had first-hand experiences with studying abroad and had opportunities to exchange ideas and perspectives with professionals from a variety of institutions from within and outside of the United…

This article focuses on a number of research projects produced by members of the Center for the Study of Education and the Musical Experience (CSEME). Written over a fifteen year span, the studies were linked by a common topic--music listening. Each study explores a distinctive aspect of music listening, and together, they have generated a more…

In order to facilitate personal development planning (PDP), the UK higher education sector is committed to introducing progress files. This article explores the experience of one institution in seeking to establish a system of progress files. It identifies the main practical problems in doing this, highlighting the lack of agreement on the skills…

This article describes an experiment that compared different methods of teaching undergraduates the fundamentals of negotiation analysis. Using student subjects, we compared three conditions: reading, lecture-only, and lecture accompanied by student use of a computerized negotiation support system (NSS). The authors examined two facets of…

The research literature documents the different approaches to learning that students in Higher Education (HE) can adopt, e.g. deep, surface and strategic. Stage 1 of a longitudinal study aimed to determine the students' approach to learning, and to assess whether this was related to previous learning experiences, initial expectations of HE and…

Besides learning transmitted content, university students develop learning patterns through pedagogical processes designed into the structure of their courses. Courses shaped within the assumptions of epistemologies and ontologies that only afford narrow learning patterns can eschew learning as valuing processes. However, university courses can be…

This paper reports on the findings of a small qualitative research project that examined the experiences of a group of adult learners attending a basic skills programme in the English Midlands during the late 1990s. It explores patterns of participation on such programmes and illustrates that early life course experiences can shape changing…