Blogs are a useful teaching tool for improving student writing and increasing class interaction. However, most studies have looked at individual blogs rather than blogs maintained by a whole class. We introduced assignments involving participation in class blogs to four science communication classes with enrolments of between 15 and 36 students.…

A clear understanding of how students view plagiarism is needed if the extensive efforts devoted to helping them engage in high-quality scholarship are to be worthwhile. There are a variety of views on this topic, but theoretical models to integrate the literature, take account of international differences and guide practitioners are limited.…

The benefits of effective parental involvement in education have been well documented and can be far reaching. When educators make an effort to involve families, parental involvement can be even more meaningful. Homework is a commonly practiced and accepted connection between school and home and affords parents many opportunities to interact with…

D. Elkonin's thesis that thinking is much more closely related to writing than to oral speech formed the basis of our three-year formative experiment at the elementary school level. In order to test this idea, second-graders through fourth-graders were given a few assignments in which they were asked to exchange thoughts in writing with their…

This article reports on a principle-based evaluation of eight dedicated extensive reading coursebooks published in mainland China and used in many universities across the country. The aim is to determine the extent to which these coursebooks reflect a core set of nine second language acquisition and extensive reading principles. Our analysis shows…

Many higher education students embark on a study of accounting under the misconception that accounting requires a high level of proficiency in manipulating data and being good with numbers, while believing that linguistic competence, especially as it relates to writing, is of less importance. This article reports on a study that examined 15…

This case study presents a cocurricular initiative at the Margery Somers Foster Center at Rutgers University Libraries in New Brunswick, NJ. The initiative resulted in an interview workshop for the course Knowledge and Power, a "mission course" of the Douglass Residential College. This discussion-based workshop uses visual and multimedia…

Motivated by predictions of the theory of Input Processing, this study adds to previous research on second language (L2) Spanish pronunciation learning by investigating the impact of two distinct types of pronunciation assignments on first language (L1) English L2 Spanish students' improvement in pronunciation of the vowels /e, o/. Two sections of…

Students in an undergraduate psychology course on Learning and Cognition used SKO (formerly AutoTutor Lite), an Intelligent Tutoring System, to create interactive lessons in which a pedagogic agent (animated avatar) engages users in a tutorial dialogue. After briefly describing the technology and underlying psychological theory, data from an…

The assessment of children's writing raises technical and practical challenges. In this paper we examine the potential use of a curriculum based measure for writing (CBM-W) to assess the written texts of pupils in Key Stage 2 (M age 107 months, range 88 to 125). Two hundred and thirty six Year three, five and six pupils completed a standardized…

Creative Problem-Solving (CPS) can be a transformative teaching methodology that supports a dialogical learning atmosphere that can transcend the traditional classroom and inspire excellence in students by linking real life experiences with the curriculum. It supports a sense of inquiry that incorporates both experiential learning and the…

This article describes a collaborative research project by the institutional research group and a team of faculty members at a Canadian university. In response to an increasingly diverse mix of students, the researchers set out to develop an understanding of relationships between student characteristics, categorized as demographic differences,…

We modified the Just-in-Time Teaching approach and developed a dual safeguard web-based interactive (DGWI) teaching system for an introductory physics course. The system consists of four instructional components that improve student learning by including warm-up assignments and online homework. Student and instructor activities involve activities…

Librarians designed a biology tutorial not only to address an assignment, but also to make tutorials more accessible to students with various learning styles. The Science Librarian created the content by using aspects of the Information Literacy Standards for Science and Technology/Engineering, an informal survey of biology faculty, and…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the possible effects of a learner autonomy training on the study habits of first-year university students as future EFL teachers. To this end, a questionnaire was used as the research instrument to elicit the study habits of the students. The questionnaire was administered to 122 students enrolled in a…