The aim of this paper is to offer an additional perspective to the understanding of educational change processes by clarifying the significance of identity learning. Today's innovations require changes in teachers' professional identity. Identity learning involves a relation between social-cognitive construction of new meanings and individual,…

The Reflections on Learning Inventory (RoLI) is an instrument designed to capture variation in students' engagement of learning--typically in a given disciplinary context or topic-specific 'episode'. Although the RoLI has been employed as a research instrument in a number of published studies on the modelling of student learning in higher…

Nature journaling is a useful skill for science students, independent of whether they also consider themselves artists. A pencil and sketchbook can be carried anywhere to record ecological information in many ways. A traditional page in a nature journal may consist of quick studies of plant and animal life sketched out as rudimentary line drawings…

The theory of memory and the ability to influence learning with conscious and unconscious factors, both internal and external, is reviewed. From a connectionist view of memory, the interactive compensatory model of learning is introduced, with an emphasis on the plastic components (motivation, prior knowledge, and metacognition) that can be…

Reflecting on the learning process of topologist Stephen Smale, certain properties and characteristics of that process are selected and analysed: the question and anticipation of future mathematics, the generalising potential thereof, and the shift from after-image or "model of..." to pre-image or "model for...". These features are explored for…

Much progress has been made in efforts to conduct, support, value, and use the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education. Nevertheless, to further enhance student learning, many challenges remain. (Contains 1 table.)

The teaching and learning of statistics has impacted the curriculum in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education. Because of this growing movement to expand and include statistics into all levels of education, there is also a considerable interest in how to teach statistics. For statistics concepts that tend to be very difficult or…

Great teachers have an intense passion for learning, which is reflected in their students. Teachers make learning enjoyable while teaching students to better organize their ideas, explore their curiosity, and glean the most from each lesson. Students mastering these skills reap the benefits throughout their lifetime. Even good teachers can get…

This study explored the effects of active learning and types of elaboration on procedure acquisition (writing database queries). Training materials emphasized elaborations of conditions for executing actions versus elaborations of the connection between conditions and actions. In the "active" conditions, participants performed structured exercises…

In this study, it is assumed that "a will to learn" must be present before teachers engage in actual learning activities. In order to explore teachers' will to learn in workplace situations, a small-scale qualitative study was conducted using a semi-structured interview, observation, a retrospective interview, and a phenomenographic approach to…

Canada's $76.5 billion annual investment in education is paying dividends. A recent international survey ranked Canadian students "second" in reading literacy, "fifth" in mathematics and "fifth" in science. For nations and individuals alike, such mastery is intrinsic to success in the new knowledge economy. Yet,…

The measurement of online self-regulation processes is a very important issue and in this rejoinder to Ainley and Patrick (this issue) I am arguing that including measures of metacognitive experiences, in conjunction with measures of other affective experiences, in various phases of task processing can increase the reliability and validity of…

Over the last ten years the role of the teaching assistant has undergone continued change and development. This article identifies many of the different contexts in which teaching assistants support behaviour for learning and further explores some of the challenges raised by workforce remodelling. Barry Groom argues that this could be an…

The biochemistry laboratory course is structured such that students work in pairs during the first half of the course. The purpose is to encourage per-peer learning processes during the students' first exposure to the software.

In Portugal, the number of students in higher education increased from 80,000 in 1975 to 381,000 in 2000 (a change from 11% to 53% in the age group 18-22), meaning a major change in the diversity of student population with consequences well known and studied in other countries. The teaching of chemistry at the University of Aveiro, for the…