Besides homework assignments, optional quizzes are a commonly used means for formative assessment in tertiary mathematics education. Instructors, for example, implement these to help students detect gaps in their understanding, or to foster a continuous and active engagement with the content. The extent to which these goals are reached, however,…

Writing can be a challenging task for students--especially for those who have grown up as second language (L2) learners. In particular, planning and structuring written content can be especially difficult for them. For this reason, the effects of a combined strategy instruction intervention consisting of a graphic organizer and storytelling on the…

Primary school students often do not have differentiated conceptions of human organs and organ systems. As understanding the inner structure of the human body is an elementary prerequisite for the development of health awareness, appropriate forms of teaching must be developed to modify students' fragmented preconceptions about the inside of their…

Even in the digital age, learning mathematics at an academic level still requires much reading of mathematical text. Research has shown that reading mathematical text requires readers to engage with all the structures of the book and with its pedagogical voice, making connections, and plausible reasoning. Specific practices and strategies that…

Experiments are an important way of working in the geography classroom. They promote and require numerous geographic skills. At the same time, experiments are only used comparatively rarely in geography lessons in Germany. In order to increase the frequency of experiments in the classroom and to better exploit their potential, GeoBoxes have been…

Background: According to the personalization effect in multimedia learning, the use of personal and possessive pronouns in instructional materials (e.g., 'you' and 'your') is beneficial. However, current research suggests that the personalization effect is inverted for emotionally aversive content (e.g., illnesses). Objective: This study…

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (HRD) is a fundamental representation in stellar physics. It contains information about key properties of stars and allows inferences about stellar evolution. The use of the HRD is an important disciplinary activity in astrophysics. For example, it is particularly important to have a graphical understanding of the…

Social media are a highly visible factor in the daily lives of our students. Why should teachers not take advantage of this and develop teaching and learning materials that use the designs found in such media to contextualise science learning? This article suggests some ideas for creating lab instructions using social media design as an innovative…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to use teaching and learning units specially devised for development of self-competencies and social competencies in the retail sector to explore how learners assess these units in relation to acceptance, quality and self-assessment of improvement in their own performance. Design/methodology/approach: The…

Very little research has been conducted on the contribution of political education to learning progress in Germany. Hence, there is a need for intervention studies measuring performance against the theoretical background of a political competence model. This model comprises three constructs: subject knowledge, motivation and attitudes. According…

Educators are experiencing difficulties with 1-day field trips in human geography. Instead of teaching students how to apply theory in the field and learn to "sense" geography in everyday life, many excursions have degraded into tourist-like events where lecturers try to motivate rather passive students against a noisy urban backdrop.…

The Commission on International Adult Education (CIAE) of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE) provides a forum for the discussion of international issues related to adult education in general, as well as adult education in various countries around the globe. The following purposes summarize the work of the…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 12th International Conference on Mobile Learning 2016, which was organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society, in Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, April 9-11, 2016. The Mobile Learning 2016 Conference seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of…

The paper is an extended work from a previous study on Taiwanese and German students' conceptions of the universe (Liu, 2005). The study revealed that students discuss astronomical events and entities based on a mental model of universe and their models of the universe seem to have similar underlying principles with historical ones. In present…

Maintains that the Holocaust is an integral part of the Canadian secondary history and social science curriculum. Asserts that pedagogical considerations for the Holocaust should not differ from the study of other major events. Discusses content selection, skill development, appropriate resources, and student sensitivities. (CFR)