How do people use information from others to solve complex problems? Prior work has addressed this question by placing people in social learning situations where the problems they were asked to solve required varying degrees of exploration. This past work uncovered important interactions between groups' "connectivity" and the problem's…

Elon University's Center for Engaged Learning facilitates multidisciplinary and multi-institutional scholarship of teaching and learning collaborations that now collectively represent over 200 scholars from over 120 institutions across more than a dozen countries. The collaborations have explored issues of engaged learning, in and beyond the…

Undergraduate courses on the nature of science (NOS) often involve teaching a set of core elements. Without extensive unpacking and reflection, the complexity of those NOS elements could be easily misinterpreted and oversimplified by the students. Our paper will explain how we teach our Hong Kong university students the NOS by introducing…

This study aims to find out the dominant factors that cause students' difficulties in learning abstract algebra. The factors investigated in this study focused on attitude, motivation, prior knowledge, lecturer performance, learning methods, as well as teaching materials. This study is a descriptive research using a survey method. We involved 30…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore how making tabletop board games elicited adolescents' design thinking during their participation in a summer game design camp at their local library. Design/methodology/approach: This study leverages qualitative approaches to coding transcripts of participants' talk. This study uses the design thinking framework…

Equally as important as growing the body of human knowledge through scientific discoveries and analysis is relaying this information to the general public in a digestible manner to establish a scientifically literate society. This dissertation approaches the multifaceted issue by combining an in-depth study of brown dwarf binary atmospheres with…

This paper provides an overview of the research landscape for the kind of professional learning needed for project-based learning to succeed. The evidence is clear that such professional learning must ensure teachers are active, self-directed learners who receive support that is meaningful and relevant to their experiences and context. The authors…

Purpose: Relying on a design science paradigm, the purpose of this paper is to describe the development and evaluation of items for an ICT artefact that supports the assessment of transversal professional competences within the validation of prior learning (VPL). To do so, the authors build a conceptual bridge between the Occupational Information…

Research has shown assistance can provide many benefits to novices lacking the mental models needed for problem solving in a new domain. However, varying approaches to assistance, such as subgoals and next-step hints, have been implemented with mixed results. Next-Step hints are common in data-driven tutors due to their straightforward generation…

Despite the recognized importance of emotion in learning (Kim and Pekrun in Handbook of research on educational communications and technology, 4th ed., Springer, pp. 65-75, 2014), instructional material design research primarily focuses on cognition, tending to ignore the affective dimension (Brom et al. in Educ Res Rev 25:100-119, 2018). To…

This chapter compared views of US- and foreign-educated faculty who teach in American universities on what represents excellent teaching using an online version of the teacher behavior checklist (TBC). Demographic criteria (including prior graduate training in teaching, rank, and teaching experiences) were used as bases for comparison. Both groups…

Water sciences education is paramount to sustainable groundwater resource management, especially of drinking water, but misunderstandings about groundwater among non-experts remain widespread. Groundwater residence is an especially challenging concept to learn because it is not directly visible in typical circumstances. The present study uses a…

Background: E-learning is increasingly becoming a preference in higher education institutions worldwide; this is intended to assist educational institutions in achieving objectives to meet the proportion of individuals with their educational opportunities. Nevertheless, instructors and students frequently have concerns with their capacity to…

This study aimed to investigate Kyrgyz learners' engagement in online courses. In this respect, the Student Engagement Scale and appropriate open-ended questions were employed in order to obtain data from learners. The sample covers 400 undergraduate learners studying at Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University. The study has a mixed research design, hence…

Quantitative abilities and techniques are vital in modern biological sciences from lab calculations and classical hypothesis testing to the growth of 'omics' and big data. Long before the employability at Higher Education can be considered, the transition between Secondary and Higher Education must be. Students doing biological sciences degrees at…