In this era of high-stakes testing and densely packed state standards, it is too easy for writing to become a meaningless process, useful only for school. Many strategies can help to get all students writing, but this author set out to find a strategy to help students see the power of writing and to know that their voices matter. Writing groups…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe specific techniques of "inquiry-based learning" employed by three instructors in Engineering schools, one in Europe and two in the USA. Design/methodology/approach: Theorists such as Bransford et al. argue that twenty-first century educators need to teach students to do more than simply…

Most of today's college students live in a world in which they are connected "24/7" (i.e. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week). Unlike their professors, students are true "digital natives." Young Americans spend more than seven and a half hours a day with some sort of electronic device, and because most of them are multitasking with those devices, "they…

Differentiated instruction in the form of tiered take-home lab exercises was implemented for students of an undergraduate-level programming course. This paper attempts to uncover the perceptions and usage patterns of students toward these new lab exercises using a comprehensive survey. Findings reveal that these tiered exercises are generally very…

This first written assignment of the semester for the author's undergraduate introductory art history class--an essay where students describe and reflect upon the significance of a family heirloom--is instrumental in meeting class objectives. The author's objectives in this class are for students: (1) to broaden their conception of what art is…

Writing allows students to clarify their thinking. Through the process of writing, students recognize what they know and what they still need to learn. This article describes how a middle school mathematics teacher and language arts teacher worked with a secondary content area literacy professor during a specific writing assignment. The "How-to"…

The following article maps the questions, methods, contexts, and theories presented in published scholarship on writing-related transfer. While not exhaustive, this review attempts to capture representative samples with a focus on recent publications. The article then highlights a multi-institutional research initiative that aims to flesh out the…

Introduction: Past research on source-based writing assignments has hesitated to scrutinize how students actually use information afforded by sources. This paper introduces a method for the analysis of text transformations from sources to texts composed. The method is aimed to serve scholars in building a more detailed understanding of how…

To test the feasibility of Wikipedia editing in large undergraduate psychology classrooms, we engaged groups of students in a large introductory-level Human Development course (N = 110) in editing Wikipedia articles to improve psychology-related content. Students attended in-class workshops and received online support to develop skills. They…

Spring 2015 marked the end of a three-year pilot program that the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) and the NAIS Commission on Accreditation sponsored on school use of the High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE), created and administered by Indiana University. To better understand the student experience, HSSSE…

Engineering educators call for a widespread implementation of hybrid learning to respond to rapidly changing demands of the 21st century. In response to this call, a junior-level course in the Construction Engineering program entitled Construction Equipment and Heavy Construction Methods was converted into a hybrid learning model. The overarching…

This article explores the degree to which student collaborations on research and writing assignments can effectively realize learning outcomes. The assignment, in this case, encouraged students to contribute discrete parts of a research project in order to develop their complementary abilities: researching, consulting, drafting, and revising. The…

We report on a case study of high Japanese student failure rates in an online MBA programme. Drawing on interviews, and reviews of exam and assignment scripts we frame the problems faced by these students in terms of a "language as social practice" approach and highlight the students' failure to understand the specific language games…

Slowly but surely, open and distance learning (ODL) programmes are being regarded as one of the most practical ways that universities across the world are increasingly adopting in order to increase access to university education. Likewise, Mzuzu University (MZUNI) set up the Centre for Open and Distance Learning (CODL) to oversee the running of…

This study reports evidence of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) that surfaced from English compositions of SiSwati learners of English in Swaziland, where English is a second language. Although CLI has been studied widely in other languages, it has not been studied in SiSwati and English, and its implications for instruction are not known.…