Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) are front-line facilitators with first-hand contact with students. They play an important role in providing an engaging learning experience for undergraduate and postgraduate students. However, most of them have not received adequate training and guidance in teaching. This paper reports on an intensive and…

This article reports the results of a case study in which an experimental wiki knowledge base was designed, developed, and tested by the Brill Science Library at Miami University for an undergraduate engineering senior capstone project. The wiki knowledge base was created to determine if the science library could enhance the engineering literature…

Formative assessment generates feedback on students' performance, thereby accelerating and improving student learning. Anecdotal evidence gathered by a number of evaluations has hypothesised that audio feedback may be capable of enhancing student learning more than other approaches. In this paper we report on the preliminary findings of a…

Taking advantage of student's passion in using technology in the form of digital media sets the trend of this study. If this passion can be harnessed, digital media may have an important and powerful role to play in education. A methodology of teaching using digital media in the form of VCD is experimented and tested for possible effect on…

The study explores the organizational characteristics of strategic planning, succession planning and career management and the processes impact on the hiring location of academic leaders from within the college, external to the college but within the system, and external to the system. The study was conducted in the 16 college Wisconsin…

Students' individual differences impact their learning experience. Reading the textbook, instructor notes, and emails may not provide all students with information in a way that meets their learning needs. Online students often say they miss traditional lectures; one option for providing these online is through video. The purpose of this paper is…

Two teachers from a school in Copenhagen were allowed to move their third grade teaching into a forest every Thursday for three years. Thus 20% of the class's regular teaching took place in an outdoor environment. The purpose of the present study was to ask the children how they experienced lessons in the classroom and the forest settings.…

At Rangelands Australia, a centre in the School of Natural and Rural Systems Management at the University of Queensland, we have recently trialled virtual classroom technology for the delivery of postgraduate support courses. We wanted to explore the capacity of this learning modality to provide collaborative, interactive, synchronous learning…

Aligned with the enhanced international commitment to early childhood education, recognition of the importance of providing young children with opportunities to develop mathematical understandings and skills is increasing. While there is much research about effective mathematics pedagogy in the school sector, less research activity is evident…

Our country's increasing social diversity, the richness and complexity of cultures, diversity of self-defined individual identities, and complexity of cross-cultural interactions make effective diversity teaching a challenging but critical need. In addition, for services to be provided in culturally competent manner educators must prepare social…

A study was undertaken to implement a series of chance games and activities in a Year 7 classroom, and investigate the students' knowledge about probability concepts, as well as their attitudes to chance. Initially, the project involved selecting a set of appropriate learning activities to develop key probability concepts which are integral to the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of audio-visual synchrony in podcasting and its possible pedagogical benefits. "Synchrony" in this study refers to the simultaneous playback of audio and video data streams, so that the transitions between presentation slides occur at "lecturer chosen" points in the audio commentary.…

Whilst participation in higher education has increased dramatically over the last two decades, many universities are only now beginning to pay more attention to the learning experiences of first year students. It is important for universities to understand how first year students conceive of learning and knowing in order to promote effective…

This article presents findings from an action research study that investigates the impact of an inquiry project designed to help better prepare pre-service middle level teacher interns for their work with English language learners (ELLs). The inquiry project combined a "rounds" approach with ethnographic observation to help pre-service…

In an earlier paper, Bopry (2005) suggests a simple organizer for the development of effective learning experiences. The basic assumption is that to be effective the experience will need to engage the learner in an activity which generates phenomena that encourage an active understanding of the way 'things work' in the world and are not simply…