This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) Organizing for Learning Improvement: What It Takes (Andrea M. Pope and Keston H. Fulcher); (2) Editor's Notes: The Leadership Imperatives for Assessment Excellence -- Imperative #2, Attracting and Retaining Talent to Support Assessment Excellence (Stephen P. Hundley);…

Educational research is subject to orthodoxies of old and novel kinds. The 'foundations' approach risks becoming stuck in footnotes to received ideas, while new-fangled disciplines seek to legitimate themselves in jargon and deference to new 'authorities'. The critical deficit in both tendencies obstructs responsible enquiry. I begin by sketching…

Despite growing awareness of the importance of incorporating integrated science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning into K-12 education, formal classroom implementation still faces obstacles. Teachers lack the knowledge and skills, especially design-thinking competence, required to design an interdisciplinary STEM curriculum.…

In this paper we describe the STEAM pedagogy developed under the European Union's Horizon 2020 project iMuSciCA (interactive music science collaborative activities). We present the pedagogical model this interdisciplinary pedagogy is based on and we give a concrete example of lesson scenario in which this pedagogy is applied. In particular we show…

South African education is in crisis, which also presents an opportunity for innovation and experimentation. This paper describes and analyses one such pedagogical experiment with a combined class of Architecture and Applied Theatre students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. Students were taken through a critical…

Courses: Health Communication, Gender Communication, Communication and Food, Communication and Diversity, Ethnography, Critical/Cultural Studies, or Qualitative Methods. Objectives: Explain, assess, and critique the social, cultural, and political discourses related to food. Analyze how communication about food reflects and influences issues of…

The concept of nature and how humans relate to nature provide the framework for this philosophical discussion on challenges facing the evolving field of early childhood environmental education. Posthumanistic thinking is proposed as an alternative to what is perpetuated through a more typical Western approach to education. This Western approach…

Incorporating engineering instruction into the elementary curriculum is not without challenges. Traditionally, researchers investigated using engineering design to promote students learning science concepts. More recently, researchers have conducted qualitative investigations to measure students' learning of engineering concepts after engaging in…

Geography as a discipline is a multi-disciplinary science which has an ability to reach out to masses through its very nature. It has an in-built affinity towards technology which has been integrated in the subject even before many other Social Science subjects adopted it. The visible collaboration of Geography with technology started during the…

Students in one discipline often receive their scientific training from faculty in other disciplines. As a result of tacit disciplinary differences, especially as implemented in courses at the introductory college level, such students can have difficulty in understanding the nature of the knowledge they are learning in a discipline that they do…

Chemistry education research (CER) as a field is inherently interdisciplinary and has traditionally borrowed ideas, frameworks, and methodologies from other fields, such as anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, and science education more broadly. In this paper we encourage researchers to continue this tradition by utilizing the rich body of…

The Fourth Industrial Revolution era has arrived, according to the World Economic Forum. Everything is changing (viz., artificial intelligence, automation, intelligent robots, self-driving cars and genetic editing) and exciting opportunities accompanied with major challenges come to the surface. On the other hand, major difficulties may also rise,…

As academic libraries focus on delivering new services in such areas as research data, digital preservation, and data curation, they have begun to explore alternative funding models and approaches to research. The Arizona State University (ASU) Library in Tempe works with the university's Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development to collaborate…

Sustainability is becoming a key component of many HE curricula. However, questions as to what sustainability is and how it can be embedded within subject specific curriculum are difficult to answer. Focussing on existing pedagogic scholarship in this area and by drawing on experiences from my own institution, this article discusses how the GEES…

Phosphates are essential components of any efficient fertilizer. Natural phosphate rock is, however, not available in every part of the world. According to the European Commission, phosphate rock has high economic importance as well as a certain supply risk--at least for Europe. For these reasons, environmental technology research has received a…