Dual enrollment programs are expanding and so are dual enrollment programs with a career and technical education (CTE) focus. Recent data available from the National Center on Education Statistics show that 82 percent of high schools had students enrolling in dual enrollment coursework in 2010-11. Nearly half of the schools had students…

As described in this brief, Tacoma Community College and South Texas College each focused on contextualization as a cornerstone of developmental education reform, albeit with different approaches. With a comprehensive look at the experience at Tacoma Community College and a supplementary example from South Texas College, we begin to understand how…

Purpose: This paper aims to report on the efforts made to enhance the engagement of IT students with non-IT-specific content. The mechanism to foster this engagement was the introduction of an eLearning information system (ELIS) for a finance-related subject within an IT undergraduate degree at the university. The subject developers were primarily…

Many nurse educators fear involvement in curriculum development because of limited understanding of what it entails. Curricula, as etymological, epistemological, and phenomenological concepts have attracted the attention of educators for decades. Several curriculum models exist to explain curriculum decision-making, and the relationship among…

This paper provides a concept and a notation for optimizing the design of social processes in gaming and learning for individuals, groups of individuals and society as a whole. Traditional approaches to the mapping and designing of the emerging social dynamics in a joyful, social education setting have fallen short of producing desirable results…

This article discusses my (recursive) process of theory building and the relationship between research, teaching, and theory development for graduate students. It shows how graduate students can reshape their conceptual frameworks not only through course work, but also through researching classes they teach. Specifically, while analyzing the…

The current philosophical paradigm in higher education, where theory transcends practice, consigns physical education to the bottom of a hierarchy of educational content (Kretchmar, 2005). Leaders of physical education teacher education programs are left with three difficult choices: (a) accept physical education's lowly position in the…

Acquisition of scientific reasoning is one of the big challenges in education. A popular educational strategy advocated for acquiring deep knowledge is inquiry-based learning, which is driven by emerging "good questions". This study will address the question: "Which design features allow learners to refine questions while preserving…

Across the nation, educators continue to face challenges as they work to individualize instruction to meet the specific needs of their students. However, theory suggests that teachers who possess a clear vision for teaching creatively weave their personal convictions for teaching with instructional practices. Drawing upon a teacher's (first…

The history of general chemistry is one of almost constant calls for reform, yet over the past 60 years little of substance has changed. Those reforms that have been implemented are almost entirely concerned with how the course is taught, rather than what is to be learned. Here we briefly discuss the history of the general chemistry curriculum and…

This paper describes research on a classification of physics problems in the context of introductory physics courses. This classification, called the Taxonomy of Introductory Physics Problems (TIPP), relates physics problems to the cognitive processes required to solve them. TIPP was created in order to design educational objectives, to develop…

This study examines the impact of effective instructional strategies, evidence-based curricula, and professional collaboration upon implementing a Response to Intervention program. Qualitative research methods, including interviews and lesson plan document analysis comprise the research data from seven teachers and one administrator. This study is…

There is a need to enhance science and geoscience literacy. Effective instruction allows students opportunity to build their own models, test them, make their own arguments, and discern reliability of the claims and arguments of others. Attempts at designing and importing such instruction have shown limited implementation fidelity, even with…

This dissertation describes the overall effectiveness of deception detection training and identifies conditions that may enhance training effectiveness through understanding how adults learn and utilizing scenario-based training. The analysis was based on a total of 1,788 evaluation data sheets (archival records). The major aim of the research is…

The publication of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 (Cosgrove et al., 2010; Perkins et al., 2010) reading literacy results heralded a crisis of confidence in educational standards in Ireland. This article examines the national and international context of teacher education reform and the politics of the policy…