Most Norwegian preservice teachers are required to perform assignments relating to digital competence during their education. In this article, one such mandatory student assignment is used to explore students' interpretations of digital teacher competence. In a study programme for future primary and lower secondary school teachers, second-year…

High school English classrooms are in need of critical literacy. This study examines the current research related to English classroom pedagogy and applies some pedagogical techniques along with critical literacy tools recommended in order to improve students' critical literacy. I am a practicing high school English teacher. I used Improvement…

Physical learning environments offer many affordances that one can choose from when designing instruction. For courses where student writing is central to course learning outcomes, a challenge exists in that innovative digital technologies may take precedence over nondigital tools, such as paper-based student writing. We argue that treating…

Finding effective ways to reach today's college audience is challenging and social media is one way to attempt to meet students in their environment. This application brief discusses a course activity and assignment that combines the scholarship of leadership education with reflection about personal leadership behaviors through social media. This…

In this essay, the authors, (Harper, professor; Sorensen, academic advisor and former graduate student; Badura, academic advisor and literature scholar) argue that reading literary fiction can indeed contribute to the ongoing development of student affairs professionals, offering as evidence the experiences of a graduate class who read novels…

An understanding of biological variation is important for understanding ecological interactions, ecosystem function, and species' response to environmental change. Biological variation is essential to species survival because natural selection acts upon the phenotypic variation within a population: the more varied the population's genetic…

This study describes how reflections allowed students to express their audience awareness as they wrote a multiaudience messages packet. We present an analysis of 27 reflections in which students described their experience when responding to the various audiences. Students' reflective depth varied, though deeper reflections demonstrate…

In post-secondary education, students must demonstrate strong time-management skills while they navigate several courses in a semester. When students struggle to meet due dates, they can accrue late penalties, which exacerbates a stressful situation. In response, two graduate programs integrated a late bank system into their online courses.…

This study uses data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K), to examine the texts assigned to eighth-grade students. By comparing student demographic information from the ECLS-K with demographic information from the texts, we examine adjustment of assignments to match students' backgrounds. In…

The author successfully implemented the "House" system in a university social studies methods class and reports on the positive results that ensued. Students reported a sense of unity, camaraderie, identity, and closeness that was missing in many of their other classes. The House assignments and competitions are described, as well as…

This article describes a pedagogical response to teaching world religions courses in a post-truth age. The course assignment and its application, utilized in both online and in-person formats, bridge student academic pursuits with religious traditions, require students to engage with source-based journalism, and extend beyond the classroom into…

Many study abroad programs promise students self-knowledge through adventure. Those that involve intense study seem at first sight not to offer adventure nor to entail risky dislocation nor to offer new insights into self. However, evidence from study abroad students at the University of Oxford reveals that they describe intellectual endeavor as…

This study explored the effects of increasing the number of elements and the degree of reasoning on second language (L2) writing and also examined the relationship between writing motivational beliefs and anxiety and L2 writing in simple versus complex tasks. Sixty upper-intermediate L2 learners were invited to write simple and complex…

Learning by teaching is a pedagogical technique that encourages mastery of a topic by having students teach each other. Student presentations, group discussions, and face-to-face teaching are frequently used to have students teach their peers. In this paper, we describe the use of a novel assignment to implement learning by teaching. In a course…

Prior work has examined the role of interest in students' single text processing and comprehension, but interest has been under-examined within the context of multiple text use. This study examines two forms of interest, individual interest and situational interest, in the context of students' completion of a multiple text task. Time on texts and…