Lecturers who are actively engaged in shaping their teaching and teaching practices demonstrate agency. Teacher agency has increasingly been described as a key factor in educational development at universities. Lecturers are expected to innovatively develop courses and continuously improve their teaching practices to respond to, for example,…

Pedagogical training is considered an efficient tool to train university teachers to understand and foster active learning. In Finland, pedagogical training courses are organized periodically at universities, and university teachers participate voluntarily to improve pedagogical knowledge and skills for teaching in higher education settings. This…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore methods of teaching sustainability and business ethics, relevant to the modern demand for student's skills and knowledge. The study explores the challenges of teaching a business school undergraduate-level course and argues that a constructivist pedagogy is a suitable epistemological approach for designing a…

In this article we examine first-year student teachers' possibilities to become interested in professional issues in teacher education. We study the phenomenon of becoming interested among first-year student teachers via three different kinds of data. We analysed our data through John Dewey's definition of interest, where a person has an interest…

Using multimodal conversation analysis, this article examines how students strive to resolve non-understandings through requests for clarification during teacher-fronted physics lectures taught in English in Finland. The findings provide new insights on the sequential environments in which students launch the requests (i.e. between or during…

This study analyzes the types of peer discussion that occur during lecture-based tutorial sessions. It focuses in particular on whether discussions of this kind have certain characteristics that might indicate success in the post-testing phase. The data were collected during an introductory physics course. The main data set was gathered with the…

In this article, we report the results of the impact of prior programming knowledge (PPK) on lecture attendance (LA) and on subsequent final programming exam performance in a university level introductory programming course. This study used Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, multiple regression, Kruskal-Wallis, and Bonferroni correction…

Academia is generally not considered a place for expressing emotions, yet emotions are inevitably present in complex activities such as teaching. We investigated whether drawings could be used as a means of gaining access to emotions in university teaching and how. The data consisted of academics' drawings of themselves as university teachers…

Lifelong learning and diverse technical information are challenges for designing curricula. The Finnish National Defence University (NDU) provides undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in academic and military disciplines according to the Bologna process. Technology is one of the major learning lines at the NDU, but basic scientific education…

This case study explores the assessment of students' learning outcomes in a second-year lecture course in biosciences. The aim is to deeply explore the teacher's and the students' experiences of the validity and reliability of assessment and to compare those perspectives. The data were collected through stimulated recall interviews. The results…

The aim of this study was to apply current pedagogical research in order to develop an effective course and exercise structure for a physical chemistry thermodynamics course intended for second or third year university students of chemistry. A mixed-method approach was used to measure the impact the changes had on student learning. In its final…

A two-week workshop was held in Finland during February 2010 and again in Glasgow in February 2011. The events were sponsored by the European Lifelong Learning programme. Students from Portugal, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Finland and the UK were placed in multicultural teams of five. Each team had two product designers, one graphic designer, one…

The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) is an international, non-profit educational organization. The Association's purpose is to advance the knowledge, theory, and quality of teaching and learning at all levels with information technology. "EdMedia + Innovate Learning" took place in Amsterdam, The…

Mathematics' skills and knowledge lay the basis for engineering studies. However, the resources targeted to mathematics' teaching are in many cases very limited. During the past years in our university the reduction of mathematics' contact hours has been significant while at the same time the study groups have grown. However, the mathematical…

Seventeen social educator students were taught to analyze their work activity by means of a Vygotsky-inspired method, drawing on Engeström's notion of an activity system. The method aimed at increasing the consciousness of the students of the structure of work activity system. The participants wrote two accounts of their field-work practice…