Describes the challenges and rewards of teaching social work, noting mistakes and successes in his approach to the task/opportunity. Using a non-BSW class in community organization practice as the template, he assesses the adaptations needed to teach students with widely diverse academic backgrounds, emphasizing the importance of careful and…

The academic content of graduate preparation programs and the competencies they instill in their graduates is central to the quality and competence of student affairs practitioners within colleges and universities. The focus of this study was to gain additional understanding of what professional competencies were considered important for entry…

Learning about social justice is far different from engaging in the emotion-laden work of learning social justice. Frequently, instructors of aspiring educational leaders find that when social justice content is introduced, the adult classroom becomes a messy community, filled with untidy and unexamined viewpoints, multiple stereotypes, and…

A quantitative analysis of the admissions requirements guidelines of the education doctoral programs at the top 20 American universities was conducted. An Internet search was used to obtain information on top-ranked world and U.S. universities. Admission requirements typically include, at minimum, an application fee (mean 55.5 USD), previous…

In the traditional statistical mechanics textbooks, the entropy concept is first introduced for the microcanonical ensemble and then extended to the canonical and grand-canonical cases. However, in the authors' experience, this procedure makes it difficult for the student to see the bigger picture and, although quite ingenuous, the subtleness of…

This article presents a design methodology for matching learning tasks with learning technologies. First a working definition of "affordances" is provided based on the need to describe the action potentials of the technologies (utility). Categories of affordances are then proposed to provide a framework for analysis. Following this, a…

This paper analyses the first author's experiences in writing a critical review at the beginning of postgraduate study in Australia. Utilising the first author's position as both a researcher and the researched, the paper provides a narrative account of her stage-by-stage progress in writing a review, followed by an interpretive analysis from a…

This paper is the collaborative effort of students in a course called EDL 646: Curriculum for Teaching, a professional course for graduate students in education, composed mostly of teachers in public schools engaged in various master's degree programs. One goal of the course is to introduce students to the task of curriculum analysis. Here, the…

In 2004, an upper Midwestern school district received a grant to administer content-specific professional development to teachers of American history. A series of nine master's level, degree-eligible courses were developed and administered by the local university's history department. At the conclusion of the grant activities in spring of 2008,…

This study had two primary objectives. First, this study sought to create a classification system to which publicly-controlled Carnegie classified Master's Colleges and Universities could be grouped according to geographical service (rural-serving, suburban-serving, or urban-serving. Second, once the classification system was developed and…

A project funded through the National Vocational Education and Training Research and Evaluation program investigated higher education programs--mostly bachelor's and associate degrees--offered by technical and further education (TAFE) institutes. This overview highlights some of the implications for staff development identified through this…

Using the Community of Inquiry (COI) model as a framework, this case study analyzed the interactions of teacher and students in an online graduate level education course at a small Christian college in the Pacific Northwest. Using transcript content analysis, communication between participants was coded as either contributing to the social,…

This study addressed the role of electronic pocket dictionaries as a language learning tool among university students in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The target groups included engineering and humanities students at both undergraduate and graduate level. Speed of reference was found to be the main motivator for using an electronic pocket dictionary.…

In an online graduate paleontology course taken by practicing Earth Science teachers, we designed an investigation using teachers' local informal educational environments. Teachers (N = 28) were responsible for photographing, describing, and integrating fossil specimens from two informal sites into a paleoenvironmental analysis of the landscape in…

"Tell me your story" is a phrase popularly being promoted in the business setting during recent years. The power of storytelling can be utilized in student teacher reflection as a strategy for making connections between theory and practice in authentic classroom environments and enabling preservice teachers to actively develop plans for growth. A…