This article describes a study which was designed to explore how sentence openers supported students' construction of arguments in an online learning environment. The study involved a group of students from a teacher training institute in Singapore. As part of the overall teacher training program, the students attended a course that equipped them…

Life Skills Education (LSE) is a novel promotional program that teaches generic life skills through participatory learning methods of games, debates, role-plays, and group discussion. Conceptual understanding and practicing of the skills occurs through experiential learning in a non-threatening setting. Such initiatives provide the adolescent with…

This study examines the use of wireless laptop technology to support the application of problem-based learning (PBL) in a special education methods course. This field based course used a progressive disclosure process in weekly seminars to address issues posed in a case study. Eight scenarios, all related to the case, were presented to upper level…

Experienced managers know that perceptions matter greatly when it comes to working effectively with employees. The task for organizational behavior (OB) instructors, especially in the undergraduate classroom, is to make the perceptions topic come alive for students who may not appreciate at first the application and significance of this subject…

If education is an inalienable right for children and young people with disabilities, securing employment plays a key role in their inclusion into adult life. A broad study was conducted to analyse the transition between the end of compulsory education and the beginning of employment in young people with disabilities in the Autonomous Community of…

Assessment of students' learning in school is deeply implicated in teaching for social justice. Yet classroom assessment is neglected relative to other aspects of curriculum and pedagogy in the literature on teaching for social justice. Some books have a relatively clear theory of anti-oppression education at their core but do not provide details…

What does it take to convince an education professor with leadership potential to seriously consider becoming a dean? In this article, the authors highlight what was learned at a conference where deans and mid-career faculty members discussed ways to tap and prepare future leaders. Funded by the Spencer Foundation, the conference was held in June…

It is argued that online discussion is a useful tool for creating opportunities for learning in teacher education. In a project designed to improve the practicum in rural areas, researchers placed pre-service teachers (PSTs) in two different moderated online discussion forums: an unstructured personal blog space and a structured threaded…

Social presence (represented by salience of instructor and fellow students) in an online teaching environment has been shown to influence perceptions of course activity and self-estimates of learning. An experiment is described here in which teacher presence is manipulated via personalized messages from the teaching assistant throughout the…

This paper proposes and discusses how to use an assignment based on "Freakonomics" as a way to foster critical thinking and statistical literacy skills within the classroom.

This action research study explored the effects of an intervention linking both culture and citizenship in a tenth-grade English language class, and aimed at finding evidence of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) skills through the writing of narrative texts in English. Participants were 75 tenth-grade students, between the ages of 14…

This study compared "Structured Controversy" (a semi-formal debate like small group activity) with a traditional open discussion format for medical and physical therapy students. We found that those students who had participated in Structured Controversy changed their personal opinion on the topic more than those who were in the Open Discussion…

This article describes a sixteen-week, read-aloud intervention conducted using culturally and experientially-relevant literature with six urban middle school youth with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), to facilitate prosocial skill development through opportunities for personal reflection and sharing through journaling and group…

This study examines discussions of model papers in a high school Advanced Placement English classroom where students were preparing for a high-stakes writing assessment. Much of the current research on talk about writing in various contexts such as classroom discourse, teacher-student writing conferences, and peer tutoring has emphasized the…

Research on asynchronous online discussions has primarily focused on their efficacy in relation to learning outcomes. Rarely are there investigations on how the design of online learning activities or how discussions could be incorporated into student learning experience. We contend that successful online activities need careful and meticulous…