The research phase preluding a design capstone project is challenging for both students and instructors. In a situation where students are free to work on a topic of their choosing, a preset, generic research design is not suitable. Imposing a rigid framework would endanger the possibility of students truly examining and capturing the complexity…

The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the notion that our world is global and interdependent. Despite the ever-increasing connection of global with local, there continues to be formidable barriers in accessing information produced in different international contexts and languages. This Innovative Practices article details the redesign of an…

The field of geography especially lends itself to fieldwork, getting students out of the classrooms and into the real world. Furthermore, studies have shown that when traditional lecture style is replaced at least in part with approaches that incorporate active learning, students earn higher examination grades and have a greater chance of passing…

In this article, the author discusses a graphic narrative or comic book writing assignment in greater detail to demonstrate the pedagogical benefits of teaching comics in the writing classroom. She argues that by assigning students a comic book project, writing instructors can promote competence in academic discourse by helping students learn and…

Students in a course on the psychology of language and thought first wrote flash fiction stories and analyzed them using course concepts. As an experiential learning exercise, they subsequently analyzed those stories for a number of psycholinguistic variables using the discourse technology Coh-Metrix. Their assignment was to change a number of…

The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) incorporates challenging literacy standards into middle grades and high school content areas within a variety of academic disciplines, not just English/language arts courses. The Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) provides schools with instructional tools needed to help teachers understand and implement…

Students in an undergraduate psychology course on Learning and Cognition used SKO (formerly AutoTutor Lite), an Intelligent Tutoring System, to create interactive lessons in which a pedagogic agent (animated avatar) engages users in a tutorial dialogue. After briefly describing the technology and underlying psychological theory, data from an…

The Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department at The Ohio State University in collaboration with the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching developed the Chemical Engineering Mentored Teaching Experience. The Mentored Teaching Experience is an elective for Ph.D. students interested in pursuing faculty careers. Participants are…

As highlighted by the National Math Panel Report (2008), consistent results from laboratory studies have demonstrated that interleaving worked examples with problems to solve improves learning for novices. The purpose of this work is to create materials and tests that can be used flexibly in classrooms and which employ worked examples interleaved…

This article recounts the experiences of a team of faculty, graduate students, and instructional technologists facilitating Rhetorical Composing, a writing-focused Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). When first offering the MOOC, we recognized quickly that we needed to emphasize the global makeup of our learning cohort to foster a stronger sense of…

The ever increasing enrollment of later-life students in institutions of higher learning warrants innovative teaching strategies to promote successful learning outcomes. This article discusses the academic challenges that instructors face and argues in support of an important assessment method, that is, portfolio writing. This novel strategy was…

Research across disciplines in recent years has demonstrated a number of gains involved in community engagement and service-learning pedagogies. More recently, these pedagogies are being filtered into digital contexts as instructors begin to realize the opportunities made available by online writing venues. This presentation describes a specific…

This newsletter of best practices in implementing the High Schools That Work (HSTW), Making Middle Grades Work (MMGW) and Technology Centers That Work (TCTW) school improvement models is based on presentations at the 27th Annual HSTW Staff Development Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the summer of 2013. The newsletter is divided up into…

The information age has presented unprecedented opportunities for educators to digitize traditional classrooms, an evolution that can empower instructors to extend the channels of knowledge dissemination and unleash the learning power of students from the manacles of physical classrooms. Since the early adoption of the Internet technology by…

Enhancing critical thinking skills for undergraduate students is important across the curriculum and between disciplines. We report on a method of improving critical thinking skills, which was studied through an Ethics and Science First-Year Seminar course. We used full cycle assessment over a three-year period to assess students' development and…