Purpose: Many doctoral students never obtain a doctoral degree, and many do not finish their studies in time. To promote aspects of effectiveness and efficiency in doctoral studies, the purpose of this paper is to explore a project perspective, more specifically how doctoral students experience their studies in terms of key dimensions of projects.…

In this study, Turkish prospective elementary science teachers' understanding of photosynthesis and cellular respiration has been analysed within the contexts of ecosystem knowledge, organism knowledge and interconnection knowledge (IK). In the analysis, concept maps developed by 74 prospective teachers were used. The study was carried out with…

Creativity has become an increasingly important competence in today's rapidly changing times, especially for school graduates who strive for pursuing a technical or scientific career. But creativity has not been integrated in the lessons or curricula of STEM subjects. To successfully integrate it in the classroom, it is important to investigate…

This article describes and provides supporting empirical evidence of a curriculum mapping strategy to aid elementary school science teachers to articulate learning goals for a given curriculum and thus build a deeper understanding of the science content embedded within the curriculum. Seven teachers used the mapping strategy to collaboratively map…

Graduate nurses have experienced a difficult transition to clinical practice. With the continuing gap in educational preparation and clinical nursing practice leading to errors in health care delivery, the nurse faculty remains challenged in performing innovative changes to the curriculum to improve and maintain quality and safe patient care. The…

This article explores how the use of concept mapping, with and without technology support, assists students in learning complex concepts to which they may have had limited previous exposure. Students were engaged in a group-based concept mapping activity, wherein they created two concept maps over the course of several weeks in a large lecture…

Many higher education (HE) system reforms in the past decades have been built on the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM). However, these reforms have not allowed HE to fully take its value for society into account. In recent years a growing call can be heard to orient the HE sector towards more collaboration, a focus on a larger set of…

What happens when teachers perceive a growing rift between their pedagogical practice and their students' lived experiences? How do teachers respond to the uncertainty that such a "relevance gap" can create? In a climate in which literacy research is often pressed to address the achievement gap and to contribute to a sense of certainty,…

This study investigated how studying a refutational map, a type of argument map, affected conceptual change. Refutational maps visually display both correct and alternative conceptions. Participants (N = 120) were randomly assigned to (1) a refutational map condition, (2) a refutational text condition, and (3) a non-refutational text condition.…

Schema is one of the most common terms used for classifying and constructing knowledge. Therefore, a schema is a pre-planned set of concepts. It usually contains social information and is used to represent chain of events, perceptions, situations, relationships and even objects. For example, Kant initially defines the idea of schema as some…

Background: Literature contends that a teacher's knowledge of concept map-based tasks influence how their students perceive the task and execute the creation of acceptable concept maps. Teachers who are skilled concept mappers are able to (1) understand and apply the operational terms to construct a hierarchical/non-hierarchical concept map; (2)…

Information sources such as relational databases, spreadsheets, XML, JSON, and Web APIs contain a tremendous amount of structured data, however, they rarely provide a semantic model to describe their contents. Semantic models of data sources capture the intended meaning of data sources by mapping them to the concepts and relationships defined by a…

In an effort to improve student conceptual understanding and help students better connect pre-existing knowledge to new ideas, a concept map assignment was implemented in a first-year college level general chemistry course. This implementation included a quasi-experiment that was carried out in discussion group recitation sections within a…

The purpose of this study was to design and develop a theory-based summary writing online tool, named Summary Writing-Pal (SW-PAL), to assist English as a second language students in improving their summary writing. It also evaluates the effectiveness of SW-PAL in enhancing the students' summary writing performance and examines their perceptions…

Current theories of bilingualism argue that the language practices of bilinguals are drawn from a single linguistic repertoire, and that enabling access to the full breadth of students' language practices can be a vital resource for further language development. This challenges commonplace practices within English as an Additional Language (EAL)…