The attempt to develop the laboratory component of a one-semester quantum chemistry course at Saint Mary's University has led to allowing the students to solve a big problem in quantum chemistry. It is done by subdivision into smaller problems that can be independently tackled by a student with a two-year calculus background.

Based on the American Art Therapy Association Research Committee's interest and support for learning how research is taught, a quantitative and qualitative survey of master's-level programs was conducted. Twenty four of the 44 surveyed programs responded. Twenty three (95.8 per cent) of the respondents required a course of at least three credits,…

Online instruction is a growing method of delivering course content in higher education. However, little research has been conducted regarding the effectiveness of such instruction for pre-service teachers, in both general education and special education, who will teach students with disabilities. In this chapter we briefly review the literature…

The Alpha course is possibly the most widespread and best-known evangelizing initiative of recent times. Billing itself as an introduction into "basic Christianity", Alpha is a programme that has been adopted worldwide by tens of thousands of churches. This paper overviews Alpha's attitude towards one of the most controversial debates in…

Objective: To integrate speaking practice with rhetorical theory. Type of speech: Persuasive. Point value: 100 points (i.e., 30 points based on peer evaluations, 30 points based on individual performance, 40 points based on the group presentation), which is 25% of course grade. Requirements: (a) References: 7-10; (b) Length: 20-30 minutes; (c)…

There exists a natural connection between civic engagement and the public speaking class. Too often, however, this connection remains indirect at best and lost in a sea of uninspired topic selections and convenient source cites at worst. This assignment offers one way to help public speaking students increase their civic awareness and imagination…

Over a three-semester period in a large undergraduate human development course, students were assigned to 5-7 member groups to work together in preparing for an exam in one of the five content units in the course. Their exam performance was tracked over three units: a baseline unit in which students worked only individually, a unit in which they…

The field of styles presents three major controversial issues: styles as value-laden versus value-free, styles as traits versus states, and styles as different constructs versus similar constructs with different labels. We address these issues by proposing an integrative model of styles--the Threefold Model of Intellectual Styles--which divides…

According to Standards for Technological Literacy (STL; ITEA, 2000/ 2002), technology education can play an important role in integrating the subjects of the K-12 curriculum. In fact, STL, developed with a "cross-disciplinary perspective," (Dugger, 1999) overlaps considerably with other common school subjects, especially social studies and…

There is a pervasive perspective that both students and college courses are not what they used to be. A utility maximization model exhibits why students prefer easier courses to those that provide more challenge, and presumably more knowledge. The model also demonstrates why faculty members accommodate these students with less stringent courses.…

Service learning pedagogy often assumes a variety of forms when connected with classroom teaching. Through a creative use of service learning pedagogy, the author constructs learning designs that foster student engagement with course content and prompts interrelated connections between the subjects and their own service learning experiences. The…

The recently promulgated IT model curriculum contains IT fundamentals (ITF) as one of its knowledge areas. It is intended to give students a broad understanding of (1) the IT profession and the skills that students must develop to become successful IT professionals and (2) the academic discipline of IT and its relationship to other disciplines.…

This paper describes a series of attempts by a novice teacher educator to foster reflective talk among interns in a weekly seminar. Drawing on Dewey's dilemma of bridging the child's inclinations with the demands of the curriculum, the paper explores the challenge of connecting interns' needs with teacher educators' goals. The paper advocates the…

Eighty years after the famous 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," which tested a teacher's right to discuss the theory of evolution in the classroom, evolution--and its most recent counterview, called "intelligent design"--are in the headlines again, and just about everyone seems to have an opinion. This past July, President Bush weighed in, telling…

This article explores the two events that took place at the University of California, Irvine campus on February 27 and 28 as part of the Difficult Dialogues Initiative of the campus. The first discussion was between the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom, Manuel Hassassian, and Edward Kaufman, former executive director of the Harry S.…