The use of guest speakers in college classes is a well-accepted pedagogical practice, but the academic literature has generally been based on instructors' or event organizers' anecdotal reflections about individual experiences. Research based upon student considerations of this practice has been especially sparse. The purpose of this study is to…

In this article, the authors highlight how a preschool teacher nurtured children's natural curiosity by inviting an expert visitor into the classroom, resulting in many possible investigations. The setting of this activity was an early learning facility at a university with a volcanologist on faculty who was able to share his expertise with…

Multiple motivation factors work together to influence how students learn and achieve. Motivation can be enhanced by instruction that supports learning-related expectancies of success and strengthens perceptions that learning is useful. It also helps to keep in check students' beliefs that learning involves unreasonable effort, emotional, or…

The student affairs administrator needs to be legally-aware, but not legally-qualified. This article seeks to cover the key legal concepts or principles underpinning the University-Student (Business2Consumer) contract that is at the core of the University's legal relationship with its Students. It does so by exploring the leading cases setting out…

High-quality civic learning opportunities remain the exception, rather than the norm, in public schools across the country. The health and future of the American democracy is dependent on all its public schools to foster democratic classrooms and prepare informed citizens--a reality far from realized in this third decade of the 21st century.…

The role and duties of a school social worker can differ greatly by state. The National School Social Work Practice Model and the National Association of Social Workers' school social work standards describe practice approaches and behaviors endorsed by the School Social Work Association of America (SSWAA). The National Evaluation Framework for…

This study aims to evaluate the STEM SOS model based on the opinions of pre-service science teachers. For this aim, the contributions and the challenges of the STEM SOS model to pre-service science teachers were investigated. The participants consisted of 23 pre-service science teachers studying in the 4th grade of science teaching at a state…

Building on classical and recent studies of the learning paradigm of higher education, the author distinguishes between receiving ideas and using them and how universities might educate students to be more open to the world, open to discovery and creativity. [This is a reprint of an article originally published in "New Directions for Teaching…

While much has been done to advance narrative assessment practice in the early years, less attention has been granted to the role of the image in this pursuit. As a consequence, the purposes, value and strategic use of images (photographs, videos, visual metaphors etc.) in foregrounding learning of young children are not well understood. This…

Effective presentation skills are an important ability for students and professionals to possess. Automatic analysis of presentation skills can help provide feedback to a speaker, and a complete analysis is possible only with both speaker and audience measurement. In this article, we propose a methodology to predict presentation skills on a small…

This study addresses the views of teachers about the benefits of interdisciplinary teaching practices in primary and secondary school education curricula, the level of the use of interdisciplinary approach and the place of interdisciplinary approach in the curriculum. The study seeks to examine the views of teachers about the interdisciplinary…

Childhood states are commonly invoked by adult humans in derisory ways and as put-downs. While infantile and clownish ways of behaving are often met with insult, we argue that these ways of being could instead be seen in terms of their productive potential. Drawing on posthuman and feminist theories and invoking clownish qualities of Haraway's Bag…

Bloom's taxonomy is a classification of learning objectives originally developed for general educational purposes. The taxonomy was revised to expand beyond cognitive processes and to include knowledge types as an orthogonal dimension. As Bloom's taxonomy is a tool widely used in biology education by researchers and instructors, it is important to…

In the study reported on here we investigated how teachers exercised their role as curriculum leaders in secondary schools in South Africa. The study was conducted in 4 schools (2 semi-urban and 2 rural) in the Vhembe district of South Africa. Semistructured individual interviews, focus-group discussions (FGDs), and lesson and meeting observations…

Plagiarism is a consistent source of concern for educators, and particularly so for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioners, whose objective is to equip students for success across the curriculum. Plagiarism has been on the EAP research agenda for some 35 years and remains a topic of considerable research interest. While perceptions of…