Assessment, including course exams, clearly indicates to students what learning goals they are expected to master in a certain course. However, most of these assessments tend to focus on generating a correct answer rather than on the type of reasoning or skills used to arrive at the answer. If educators value skills in addition to the correctness…

Model-based instruction offers numerous benefits to students, including increased content knowledge and critical thinking. This study explored the differences in the knowledge outcomes and reasoning processes employed by undergraduate students in an introductory biology lab as they constructed, revised, and simulated a computational model of a…

Becoming a proficient writer is a core competency for effective communication and central to college and career readiness for learners. Despite broad adoption of more rigorous standards and a push to incorporate writing across the curriculum, the majority of U.S. students across different grade levels fall short of grade-level expectations in…

This article explores the historical importance of argument and self-learning within the structure of liberal arts education and how these can be applied to the design of university and community college general education classes to help students develop skills in effective communication, critical thinking and self-learning. Research in classical…

What tools are available to foster independent and critical thought in the music classroom? We propose that visual mapping--a method of representing relationships and associations between a main concept and other ideas, subtopics, or examples--is an ideal tool for doing exactly this. After examining the principles and usefulness of mapping in a…

After the summer nesting period, broad winged hawks are known for migrating nearly 10,000 kilometers, (6,200 miles) each fall from their breeding grounds in North America to tropical biomes in South America, where they spend the winter. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has labeled broad-winged hawks as a species of "least…

Increasing and decreasing functions can be combined into a quadratic to explore the competing demands of number of sales, price points and profit (or loss). An interesting application of taxation rates is also explored.

With the advance of engineering education research and scholarship, there has been an increased focus on amending chemical engineering courses to increase student learning, engagement and enjoyment. These approaches are often incorporated in project-based courses such as capstone design courses and laboratory courses, providing opportunities to…

Due to the holistic and often contradictory nature of sustainable design, learning for sustainability in the architectural design studio requires students to adopt critical and reflective practices. This research developed a reflective mapping framework to enable deep learning. It was created through a participatory action research methodology…

This is a research report of teaching patterns of critical thinking using the competency-based 3CA (an acronym for the educational practices of Concept maps, Critical thinking, Collaboration, and Assessment) model of classroom instruction to change the grammar of schooling. Critical thinking is defined as the "WH questions": "what,…

The evolution of resistance to antibiotics provides a timely and relevant topic for teaching undergraduate students evolutionary biology. Here, we present a module incorporating modified sequencing data from eight antibiotic resistant pathogen outbreaks in hospital settings with bioinformatics and phylogenetic analyses. This module uses whole…

Constructing scientific arguments is an important skill, and is specifically addressed by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) science and engineering practice of Engaging in Arguments From Evidence. To ensure that students understand the significance of a scientific argument, they need experiences that will help them understand, use, and…

This study was conducted to identify the level of practice of critical thinking skills (CTS) and to determine whether the dimensions of perception and readiness of the teachers were the predictors of the implementation of the CTS. A cross-sectional quantitative approach using questionnaires have been used on 226 Mathematics teachers teaching in…

The Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) and the Science Writing and Workshop Template (SWWT) are two active learning instructional approaches which combine writing, inquiry, collaboration, and reflection, elements which have been associated with critical thinking development. In this study, we used a quasi-experimental pretest-post-test design to…

This study investigates critical thinking (CT) studies in e-learning settings to provide a comprehensive analysis of CT studies. Research indexed in the Web of Science database which includes major peer-reviewed social sciences citation index journals in the e-learning field from January 2006 to November 2017 was searched for a systematic review…