Nowadays, higher education systems are being called to reconsider the aims of assessment if we want that students develop skills and competencies for their future personal and professional life. Although assessment holds an essential position in the higher education field, educational research still seems inchoative. Current studies, especially on…

For this study, I surveyed 146 urban university preservice art teachers about their attitudes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) issues, including the stereotypes, biases, and misconceptions of this population that these teachers acquired from the media. A three-part questionnaire asked their response to several…

Higher education in America, still thought to be the world leader, is in crisis. University students are falling behind their international peers in attainment, while suffering from unprecedented student debt. For over a decade, the realm of American higher education has been wracked with self-doubt and mutual recrimination, with no clear…

"Modeling Mathematical Ideas" combining current research and practical strategies to build teachers and students strategic competence in problem solving.This must-have book supports teachers in understanding learning progressions that addresses conceptual guiding posts as well as students' common misconceptions in investigating and…

Background: Incorporating environmental sustainability (ES) into engineering education is vital to both individual engineering students' success and to the profession as a whole. This study explores attitudes, conceptions, and misconceptions about ES that students bring to the classroom. A promising framework of design-based research is applied to…

A focus on anything other than instruction undercuts the legal and moral rights of students with disabilities to an appropriate education and fails to produce substantive social justice. Differences among differences must be recognized to guarantee the civil educational rights to which people with disabilities are entitled.…

In this "Postcard from the Podium," Belinda Luke describes her first experience on a faculty Academic Misconduct Committee. From a personal perspective, the experience made her reconsider her own views not only on plagiarism--to which there are varying degrees ranging perhaps from students looking at a previous assignment to using it as…

The way in which the media report on school violence influences public perceptions, gives rise to particular attitudes and can influence decisions by policy makers. The more frequently an issue is presented in a specific way, the more likely it is for readers to perceive the media's version as the truth. Although news is assumed to be reliable,…

The topic of budgeting and financial resources often strikes fear in the hearts of community college administrators and faculty, as they believe it is an arcane and complex art understood only by accountants and financial specialists. This chapter attempts to demystify the basic concepts involved in budgeting and addresses approaches to budgeting,…

A review of available books, articles and on-line resources which deal with "Research-Based Instructional Strategies" will produce a plethora of materials which promote the effectiveness of these strategies on student achievement. Also, a perusal of classroom instruction and teacher evaluation instruments will reveal that many of the…

Science is of critical importance to daily life in a knowledge society and has a significant influence on many everyday decisions. As scientific problems increase in their number and complexity, so do the challenges facing the public in understanding these issues. Our objective is to focus on 3 of those challenges: the challenge of reasoning about…

The aim of this paper is to explore and clarify the idea of "powerful knowledge" as a sociological concept and as a curriculum principle. The paper seeks to clarify its conceptual basis and to make its meaning and the arguments it implies, less ambiguous and less open to misunderstanding. This will enable us to suggest some of the…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the cognitive processes used by individuals who read a refutational text about physics and demonstrated conceptual change learning. Four high school readers whose initial conceptions differed from the scientific conception of Newton's first law thought aloud while reading a refutational…

Life sciences became Biology, a formal scientific discipline, at the turn of the nineteenth century, when it adopted the methods of reductive physics and chemistry. Mendel's hypothesis of inheritance of discrete factors further introduced a quantitative reductionist dimension into biology. In 1910 Johannsen differentiated between the…

In 1858, Darwin published "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection." His explanation of evolution by natural selection has become the unifying theme of biology. We have found that many students do not fully comprehend the process of evolution by natural selection. We discuss a few simple games that incorporate hands-on…