In this article, the authors demonstrate how they modified a well-known game to use it as an educational simulation to help students understand difficult material, specifically critical theory. The goals for the simulation focus on improving the comprehension levels of critical theory for students in a course on the Sociology of Deviance, although…

Engineering, the "E" in STEM, is seldom taught as a distinct curriculum subject in English and Welsh schools to pupils under the age of 14 years. This contrasts with design and technology (D&T), taken in this paper to represent the largest contributor to the "T" in STEM (the remainder being taken to be the computing and…

The "Census in Schools Educator Update" is sent to educators and educational organizations periodically to keep them informed about current and upcoming census data and to provide ideas about how to use data in the classroom. This issue of the "Census in Schools Educator Update" newsletter focuses on the following topics: (1) 2010 Census; (2)…

Initiative plays an important role in special fine art education. Teachers should take into full consideration the profile of the hearing-impaired students. For better teaching achievement, it is the teachers who shoulder the responsibility to activate the subjective role and consciousness of the hearing-impaired students by arousing their sense…

Energy is a fundamental concept in physics, playing an important role in every aspect of the world around us. The conversion of energy among its many forms has enabled both the sustenance of living organisms on Earth and our development of a society based on the manufacture of products for our own convenience. All of these aspects of energy are…

Extracting DNA from fruit and vegetables provides students with hands-on opportunities to engage with a visualisation of genetic material that can later be supported by ICT and practical model making. Here is a quick, cheap and easy way to extract DNA from strawberries that avoids the mess involved in other DNA extractions, such as from dried…

Parents may be familiar with music education from their own experiences, but curricula and teaching processes have changed since their youth. Informances are informal opportunities for music educators to describe the curriculum; demonstrate classroom activities, rehearsal procedures, and assessment techniques; and encourage the "audience" to…

The author teaches techniques to focus students on shape and value, but wanted to challenge advanced art students with an activity that would be difficult yet equally rewarding. In this article, the author describes an art project wherein students made photorealistic self-portraits using newspaper.

Various motivational frameworks converge to suggest that highlighting the relevance of a learning activity yields benefits for students' learning and performance. Herein, we review a set of studies grounded in self-determination theory's distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goals, which show that the beneficial effect of a learning…

Open-ended activities can be a powerful and engaging tool, promoting authentic learning and opportunities for formative as well as summative assessment. This article presents an activity that shows how an open-ended task--with a variety of solution strategies and multiple correct answers--can be an effective educational activity which also offers…

Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was both a painter and a politician. An exhibition of his work at the Saint Louis Art Museum in the fall of 2007 sponsored by Bank of America featured his painting "The County Election" along with its preparatory drawings. In anticipation of the exhibition, the museum's education…

Several authors have described the many benefits of undergraduate practica, how to organize an undergraduate practicum experience, and different undergraduate practicum activities. This article provides a description of the process of organizing and implementing National Depression Screening Day at a university campus as an undergraduate practicum…

Frequent five-minute visits focused on specific "look-fors" can give principals valuable information about what's working--or not working--in their schools. A program of brief but frequent classroom walkthroughs has become an increasingly popular strategy in recent years for informally supervising teachers and observing classroom activities. But…

The concept of framing from anthropology and sociolinguistics is useful for understanding student reasoning. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for sensemaking or as an assignment to fill out a worksheet. The student's framing affects what she notices, what knowledge she accesses, and how she thinks to act. We…

This paper describes an exploratory evaluation of the Peers Early Education Partnership "Room to Play", an innovative and experimental "drop-in" service seeking to attract and engage "hard-to-reach" families in one of the most deprived areas of a Midlands city. Located in a shop unit of a busy community shopping…