The transformation of an entire curriculum to a hybrid format at a midwestern university involved not only a comprehensive curriculum revision and extensive online development, but also much uncertainty, a huge learning curve, and an overwhelming workload on the part of faculty. Outcomes of that transformation were studied to determine the affect…

While learning is commonly conceptualised as a social, collaborative process in organisations, online courses often provide limited opportunities for communication between people. How do students engage with content-based courses? How do they find answers to their questions? How do they achieve the learning outcomes? This paper aims to answer…

Over the past few decades there has been a substantial swing among higher education practitioners towards a more constructivist approach to learning. Nevertheless, it is still evident that many instructivist models are widely used in both classroom and online learning environments. A key challenge for educators is linking learner needs, pedagogy…

Threshold concepts are those transformative concepts in a discipline that are often difficult to understand when first encountered, but when mastered they transform students, both epistemologically and ontologically in relation to the discipline. Using the characteristics of threshold concepts, existing curricula and summative content analysis of…

Teachers' role in curriculum design is a broad question that inspires political educational reforms among European countries, a trend that even extends to higher education politics. The perspective on teachers' role in curriculum, both at the level of the policies and of the practices, shapes recent educational reforms in Portugal. These are the…

It is known that assessment drives learning and hence a good assessment design is key to effective student development. This paper gives some case studies in effective assessment strategies within engineering. The main contribution is to demonstrate how one can simultaneously meet a number of requirements with individual assessments and therefore…

Learning the fundamentals of programming languages has always been a difficult task for students. It is equally challenging for lecturers to teach these concepts. A number of methods have been deployed by teachers to teach these concepts. This article analyses the result of a class test to identify fundamental programming concepts that students…

This article offers five instructional enhancements that help students become better readers. These classroom practices coincide with five key elements of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading instruction: "extensive practice and exposure to print," "commitment to building student motivation," "attention to reading…

The recent explosion of Chinese students in Australian universities presents serious challenges for staff in higher education as we try to meet the conflicting demands of our positions. On one hand, we must offer diverse international students opportunity to compete equitably with their Australian counterparts and to receive an appropriate…

A recent national curriculum guide for upper secondary schools in my home country, Iceland, requires secondary schools to work towards equality and five other overarching aims. This requirement raises questions about to what extent secondary schools have to change their curricula in order to approach these aims or work towards them in an adequate…

This dissertation reports on student learning and students' perceptions of learning in contextualized composition courses at a Midwestern community college. The teacher-scholar who conducted the research taught four different contextualized composition courses for occupational program students and collected various forms of data, including student…

The purpose of this study was to explore the efficacy of two Response to Intervention (RTI) Tier 2 literacy programs used with sixth graders in a middle school setting to determine if the use of either the SuccessMaker® or READ 180® Tier 2 RTI literacy program for two marking periods, or eighteen weeks, positively impacted student achievement as…

The provision of a well-planned, modified, and articulated curriculum that would provide students with disabilities appropriate access to the general curriculum and effective instructional support is the thrust of this paper. The paper examined the various issues on the concept and objectives of special education and the role of a well-designed…

Helping students achieve advanced critical thinking and writing skills in large undergraduate classes is a challenge faced by many university faculty members. We addressed this challenge in a three-year project using team course design, built around a cognitive apprenticeship model, to enhance undergraduates' writing, critical thinking, and…

Past work has demonstrated that language comprehension ability correlates with general chemistry course performance with medium effect sizes. We demonstrate here that language comprehension's strong cognitive grounding can be used to inform effective and equitable pedagogies, namely, instructional interventions that differentially aid low-skilled…