There is a growing interest in conceptualizing, defining, and assessing what are often called 21st century skills or deeper learning competencies. The purpose of this literature review is to explore the conceptualizations, definitions, and understandings in the research literature related to self-directed learning. Key initial questions include:…

The explosion of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in the recent years creates the demand for scalable, automatic approaches to process and evaluate OERs, with the end goal of identifying and recommending the most suitable educational materials for learners. We focus on building models to find the characteristics and features involved in…

The author's goals in this exercise were to use an Excel project to teach students about the effects of changing states of nature on critical path emergence as well as compare the impact of the PERT beta and triangular distributions on project completion times. Previous research into the PERT (program evaluation and review technique) beta…

In this photo essay, I enact how a creative pedagogue engages with artistic practice and contemplative inquiry. As a poet, at home in words, photography represents a creative risk. This vulnerability is felt in the sharing of the work through the lens of (re)search. Hence, I ask: Does it have wings? By delving in expressive forms toward the…

A test method is described for determining the divisibility of non-negative integers by a prime number. The test uses an integer multiplying factor that is defined for each prime, designated as [beta], to reduce the non-negative integer that is being tested by an order of magnitude in each of a sequence of steps to obtain a series of new numbers.…

Renal clearance encompasses a somewhat abstract concept, which makes it a hard-to-visualize phenomenon. It is a confusing topic for students and a difficult task for the instructor to teach. In order to improve or facilitate the teaching-learning process of renal clearance, an alternative strategy is presented here. To properly characterize the…

Principles of skill acquisition dictate that raters should be provided with frequent feedback about their ratings. However, in current operational practice, raters rarely receive immediate feedback about their scores owing to the prohibitive effort required to generate such feedback. An approach for generating and administering feedback responses…

Marie Dugan was 35 years old when she went to her first American Montessori Society (AMS) conference. The year was 1969; the city was Boston. Four hundred people attended, most of them from the East Coast. The keynote speaker was Dr. Nancy McCormick Rambusch, founder of the American Montessori Society. In this brief article Dugan describes that…

Recent years have seen much interest in positive education. In this article, we will show how person-centred education, like positive education, is concerned with the promotion of human flourishing. Both offer ways in which education goes beyond traditional skills and knowledge to a concern for the well-being of people. However, we argue that an…

In this regular "American Educator" column, findings from the field of cognitive science that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application are considered. Individuals vary in their views of what students should be taught, but there is little disagreement on the importance of critical thinking skills. In free societies, the…

Recently, inspirational articles on research methodology have been written on the development of the mixed-methods approach. This area of study concerns methodological trends in the construction of research designs. One may ask, whether it is possible to construct a notional piece of investigation, potentially highlighting a research design that…

In this interview, Joe Norris reflects on his early experiences with performance and how he became involved with collective creations and playbuilding. His work has led him to develop and implement qualitative research methods using playbuilding. In his role as artistic director of Mirror Theatre, he has been the driving force behind numerous…

How do we enlarge the space of the possible to encourage our students to notice the educational, social, economic, communal, and political scripts that perform us? Academic performance imagines new ways of performing research. Conventional academic performances have been interrupted. Be aware. We can never take for granted the performance that is…

In this article, John Tillson discusses the conditions under which what he calls "knowledge insertion" would be desirable "for the one who has knowledge inserted." He argues that making use of knowledge insertion would not be cost free; in particular, it would come at the price of relationship goods realized through…

Background/Context: In recent years, the humanities have frequently been described as "under attack" or "in crisis" in both popular media and academic writing. In this climate, it is particularly critical to develop a stronger understanding of the value of the humanities. While there are many theoretical arguments about their…