Real-life room-escape games are ludic activities in which participants enter a room in order to get out of it only after solving some riddles. In this paper, we explain a Room Escape teaching experience developed in the Engineering School at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The goal of this activity is to increase student's motivation and to…

This paper presents the requirements work carried out as part of developing an intervention to improve students' critical thinking skills using location-based mobile learning. The research emerged from seeking to identify ways of getting Interaction Design students into real world environments, similar to those in which they will eventually be…

Higher Education in developing countries is frequently restricted to students from privileged backgrounds, especially those from private secondary education. In Pakistan, access to Higher Education, while competitive, is more broadly based, with state universities particularly recruiting students from diverse backgrounds. Just as Widening…

This paper considers the factors that impact on student success in first year science mathematics courses at the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUI Maynooth). These factors include previous performance in the subject, attendance at lectures and tutorials, the number of assignments submitted, and attendance at the Mathematics Support…

This paper reports the findings from a research study conducted by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) in partnership with the Faculty Inquiry Network (FIN), a professional development program designed to engage faculty at 18 colleges across California. Participants were FIN faculty teams involved in iterative…

For a public speaking instructor, his involvement in forensics as a graduate student led to the use of cameras as an instructional tool. Video technology can be used in the classroom to maximize overall student performance. All graded speeches were videotaped and evaluated in class, which allowed students an extra opportunity to view their peers,…

The first section of this paper discusses the writing crisis as it applies to education in journalism and offers examples of writing by college students and faculty members to illustrate the depth of the crisis. It cites, however, a recent survey showing that journalism schools across the United States are increasing the emphasis on writing skills…

Tentative results from a study of the writing improvement of college freshmen indicate that underlying linguistic competence can be released by exercises that allow students to use what they already know, that syntactic competence increases with maturity, and that complex pedagogic variables contribute to writing growth. Although a number of…

A study examined the effectiveness of a writing center in improving student writing. All Composition 121 instructors except those who taught in the writing center were included. Students (1519 were enrolled in 69 sections of Composition 121) and instructors were randomly placed into three groups: Group I, the experimental group; Group II, the…

This paper presents 10 units in an introductory oral communication course which utilize instructional techniques necessary for student success in attaining 15 course objectives. Each unit consists of a goal statement and sections on objectives, content description, enabling activities, and instructional resources. The time frame for instruction…

A study of college students was conducted to identify academic skill areas in which students were deficient. Dormitory residents were surveyed by questionnaire in the fall post-midterm (N=300), fall pre-final (N=210), winter (N=261), and spring (N=128). The questionnaire measured factors of distractability, concentration, self-concept, difficulty…

A study was conducted to determine if changes in a student's writing and speaking skills over the period of a semester could be measured reliably and to measure what changes, if any, occur in these skills over this period. A pretest-posttest design employing the speech and writing portions of ACT's College Outcome Measures Project was used to…

Contending that previous investigations into the efficacy of underlining as a study technique have yielded mixed results due to the specific experimental methodologies employed, a study addressed the issue by manipulating both the reading comprehension skills of students and the kind of information given to them about underlining. Specifically,…

Recent reports have shown that black high school and college students do not fare well on standardized tests, possibly because they have not been successful when dealing with materials requiring analytical thinking in the past. Several psychologists have found that mental imagery can be used to increase motivation to achieve idealized goals.…

Controlled composition--a method closely related to sentence combining--can be beneficial for college students whose writing is characterized by frequent errors and lack of fluency. Controlled composition consists of copying short, competently written compositions exactly except for certain stipulated changes. The assignments, which progress in…