The study of human bioscience is viewed as a crucial curriculum in allied health. Nevertheless, bioscience (and particularly physiology) is notoriously difficult for undergraduates, particularly academically disadvantaged students. So endemic are the high failure rates (particularly in nursing) that it has come to be known as "the human…

Diversification of our country's science talent pool is critically needed and can only be achieved by stimulating interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) among students from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. However, motivating, increasing the number, improving retention rates, and graduation rates of…

A considerable amount of research has been undertaken to provide insights into the valid assessment of team performance. However, in many settings, manual and therefore labor-intensive assessment instruments for team performance have limitations. Therefore, automated assessment instruments enable more flexible and detailed insights into the…

The authors contribute to growing evidence that team charters contribute positively to performance by empirically testing their effects on key team process outcomes. Using a sample of business students in a team-based task requiring significant cooperative and coordinative behavior, the authors compare emergent team norms under a variety of team…

In this Exemplars case, the fifth and final under the direction of the current coeditors, the authors present a reflective account of an ongoing, complex, multiyear, multinational monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system conducted for African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD), an international development program. The…

The twenty-first century has seen the rapid emergence of wireless broadband and mobile communications devices which are inexorably changing the way people communicate, collaborate, create and transfer knowledge. Yet many higher education campus learning environments were designed and built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prior to…

In fall 2012, an interdisciplinary team of science, English, and library faculty embedded reading, writing, and information literacy strategies in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curricula as a first step in improving student learning and retention in science courses and aligning them with the Next Generation Science and…

Learning is most effective when accompanied by doing. If someone desires to become a baseball player, being told how to play the game, watching others play and even understanding the rules of the game are mostly ineffective if the individual never "swings the bat". This paper outlines the implementation of this method (swinging the bat)…

In the face of a myriad of complex water resource issues, traditional disciplinary separation is ineffective in developing approaches to promote a sustainable water future. As part of a new graduate program in water resources, faculty at the University of Idaho have developed a course on interdisciplinary methods designed to prepare students for…

According to a recent article in the "Chronicle of Higher Education" (April 2011), team assignments are increasingly prevalent in business schools. Not only are they ubiquitous, they are critically important, as our university's strategic plan states, "collaboration and teamwork are the keys to creating successful leaders."…

The challenge of developing Individualized Education Program documents that are representative of a team decision making process and are in compliance with IDEA 2004 is well documented in the literature. One of the main objectives of IEPs is to serve as the foundation of a child's academic program. Inclusion of children with disabilities in the…

In this paper we examine the collaborative performance of undergraduate engineering students who used shared project documents (Wikis, Google documents) and a software version control system (SVN) to support project collaboration. We present an initial implementation of TeamAnalytics, an instructional tool that facilitates the analyses of the…

There is an abundance of literature on the importance of teamwork in undergraduate degrees; how to teach it, how to assess it and how to manage it. However, there is also much recorded about students' dislike of teamwork, especially where an early experience is unsatisfactory and builds resistance against such assessment. Accordingly, despite the…

The public, education, and workforce sectors all have expressed interest regarding the key knowledge, skills, and abilities that enable individuals to be productive members of society. Although past efforts have attempted to create frameworks of student learning outcomes, the results have varied due to different perspectives and goals. Thus, the…

Informed by sociocultural theory and previous research on peer scaffolding in second language (L2) learning, which largely focuses on collaborative writing in English as a second language (ESL) contexts, this study investigates the ways in which Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) students provide peer scaffolding to each other during a…