The current educational arrangements of advanced liberal democracies continue to isolate various ethnic and racial groups. Disadvantaged minority students attend inferior schools. The overreliance on the curriculum as a design for teaching and learning renders school learning less relevant for "knowledge work" jobs in network societies.…

Background: Solving ill-structured problems is an important aspect in many professions, including the teaching profession. It is therefore appropriate to engage pre-service teachers in solving ill-structured problems. Aim: This study investigates the ill-structured problem-solving processes in an un-moderated asynchronous discussion for one group…

When the author began teaching as a young assistant professor at Caltech in 1966, his assignment was to take over the undergraduate biochemistry course taught for many years by Henry Borsook, who was about to retire. Students dreaded this course. Having delighted in biochemistry during his graduate training at Stanford, he was determined to put…

Aim: Tutor performance and tutorial group productivity interact with each other in a complex manner. The aim of this study was to investigate how tutor performance, tutorial group productivity and the effectiveness of a PBL unit interact with each other. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) Does the tutor performance score differ across different…

The presentation involves students in a hands-on analysis of artifacts to create a time line of their local area's past societies. This exercise is more of a unit rather than a one-time activity. Procedures, ideas, and background for developing your own unit are presented in this article. The purpose of this unit is to engage students in applying…

The authors investigated the microlevel processes of collaborative reasoning in heterogeneous peer dyads working on an open-design task in elementary geometry. Special attention was paid to the nature of student social interaction, problem-solving strategies, and mathematical language and how they shape collaborative problem-solving processes.…

If schools of education are to remain relevant in this era of accountability, they must approach the preparation of school leaders as part of an urgent social justice agenda. At the heart of this agenda is the improvement of access to educational opportunities for all children, a goal to be accomplished through instructional leadership grounded in…

This study was conducted on informal aspects of an inquiry-based physics course and reports findings about learning interactions and discourse observed during the first three semesters the course was offered. The course offered an alternative to the large lecture instruction typical in introductory university physics and promoted learning in an…

The authors describe a journey of self-study during which one author shifted from traditional, teacher-driven approaches to a more problem-based inquiry approach to teaching mathematics. He videotaped a series of lessons taught to sixth-grade students over a semester and analyzed his teaching during discussions with his mentor at the university.…

This article examines issues encountered over a two-year period by a faculty librarian at the Penn State University Libraries while developing and delivering course-related library instruction employing problem-based learning (PBL) in the First-Year Seminar (FYS) of the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). The process of…

The quality reform of higher education in Norway has generally recommended a substitution of classroom teaching with more active forms of learning in higher education. This study reveals that ignoring the student's personality type may be in conflict with the purpose of the reform. The student's personality type affects both the most effective…

This meta-analysis reviews experimental and quasi-experimental studies in which students learned by constructing, modifying, or viewing node-link diagrams. Following an exhaustive search for studies meeting specified design criteria, 67 standardized mean difference effect sizes were extracted from 55 studies involving 5,818 participants. Students…

Instructional designs, embedding learning in meaningful contexts such as problem-based learning (PBL) are increasingly used for fostering expertise to prepare students for the demands of the future workplace. However, cognitive outcomes of these curricula in terms of expertise outcomes are not always conclusive. Based on the instructional…

This issue of "Journal for Learning the Arts: A Research Journal on Arts Integration in Schools and Communities" embodies the range of arts and learning possible in our schools and communities. The articles reflect the diverse landscape of arts education, including dance, poetry, visual arts, drama, music and media. Each author takes to…

A great deal of value is placed on student research within universities, exemplified by the prominent role of the dissertation or extended written work at the end of many programmes, and the more general benefits of embedding research-based learning into a curriculum in order to develop higher-order learning. This article reports on a…