Compares the negative attitudes of professors toward pressure to integrate information technology to similar reactions to audiovisual materials 30 years ago. Presents a case study conducted at the University of Central Florida, outlining student and teacher reactions to Web-based courses. Suggests that faculty should maintain a proactive outlook…

Summarizes a class project that attempts to make students more aware of the pervasiveness of women's images in culture and how gender norms shape women's status in society. Class consists of innovative writing assignments, discussions, informal presentations, and collection of cultural artifacts. Includes descriptions of these activities and…

Describes an interdisciplinary instructional unit using the historical novel "The Killer Angels" to teach about the Civil War. Writing assignments focused on character analysis from the novel bolstered by outside historical research. Student response was overwhelmingly positive. Includes suggested guidelines for developing an…

Describes a qualitative action research study that investigated the effectiveness of an assignment for tenth graders that required primary research methods and an essay. Topics include authentic research; constructivist theory of learning; performance-based assessment; student journals; peer editing; teacher-librarian collaboration; and student…

Explores the evolution of postmodernism and the many differences between modernism and postmodernism. Describes two strategies (authentic instruction and discipline-based instruction) for structuring a postmodern curriculum. Highlights an activity that helped fifth-grade students learn about postmodern art and real-world issues by studying the…

The Experimental Reflection Portal, or "XRePort" is an online system that pairs students and teachers from different schools and allows them to "talk" about their common science investigations. In this way, students communicate their science knowledge "and" experience firsthand the benefits of the collaborative nature…

How do students react to being told that they have failed a test required for high school graduation? In 2000, 7,989 students were wrongly informed that they had failed the Minnesota Basic Standards Test in mathematics. The authors conducted a survey of 911 of these students to assess the psychosocial impact of this event. More than 80% of…

Inquiry-based laboratories are acknowledged as the preferred method of instruction for development of research skills. Much has been written about changes in student performance associated with inquiry, but less is known about how students view the inquiry-based format or whether they perceive a benefit from this type of instruction. The Student…

College and university faculty and administrators are responsible for constructing academic honesty policies and communicating them to students. This is often attempted through institutional honesty policies and university-wide honor codes. While these approaches have been widely researched, less attention has been given to the role of individual…

What occurs when male and female teachers violate accepted conventions of the writing classroom by assuming untraditional roles? Numerous studies have shown that when people exhibit behavior contrary to the normal gender-based expectations, the results are less than positive. For the college professor who does not act according to the usual…

This paper summarizes the initiatives taken by the Women in Engineering Program at the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. Two programs are described - the Research Fellows Program and the Teaching Fellows Program. Both are designed to expose women undergraduate students in engineering to the challenges and rewards…

Many current efforts to develop large-scale science assessments involve hands-on tasks because of their presumed power to elicit and measure scientific reasoning skills. An analysis of the processes in which students engage while responding to such assessment is needed in order to discover the specific forms of reasoning that tasks elicit. This…

Open University course production involves a course team that is responsible for the initial planning, production, and presentation of the teaching material. Informal work sessions with other authors create an environment critical for authors' socialization into course production and the perpetuation of course team practice. This environment…

A study examined preservice teachers' responses to a teacher education course and explored the relationship between how the preservice teachers made sense of the coursework and the assumptions of teacher educators. Nine preservice teachers enrolled in a preservice content area reading summer course were each interviewed six times during the…

This study investigated the predictive relationship between initial student attitudes, admissions test scores, years of high school math taken, and the student's subsequent achievement in introductory college chemistry. A group of 179 students who began as new freshmen during the same fall semester and took an introductory chemistry course during…