Life sciences faculty agree that developing scientific literacy is an integral part of undergraduate education and report that they teach these skills. However, few measures of scientific literacy are available to assess students' proficiency in using scientific literacy skills to solve scenarios in and beyond the undergraduate biology classroom.…

Research has indicated the importance of evaluating the experiences related to developing e-portfolios (electronic portfolio) to contribute to the overall excellence in teaching and learning. Researchers (instructors) of the present study used an exit e-portfolios, a questionnaire and follow up interviews to describe development and evaluation of…

Physical education teacher education faculty are responsible for educating the next generation of teachers. Despite their significant role, little is known about their characteristics, work preferences, or role responsibilities. The last comprehensive study undertaken to examine these variables was conducted approximately 25 years ago by Metzler…

Purpose: This paper seeks to describe and analyse an approach to course design as part of a strategic, technology-inspired, cross-university intervention to widen participation. A curriculum framework was developed for students who wished to make their work the focus of their study and could not readily access current university provision. A…

Objective: This report describes the development and preliminary findings regarding the reliability, validity, and sensitivity of a scale that has been developed to assess practitioners' perceived familiarity with, attitudes about, and implementation of the phases of the evidence-based practice (EBP) process. Method: After a panel of national…

In the Information Communication Technology era teachers will have to wisely use the online environment in order to realize a new pedagogy. The penetration of the internet and collaborative online instruments to teaching and learning affect the quality of teaching. We have developed a digital indicator to evaluate the quality of the online tasks…

The "PISA 2009 Technical Report" describes the methodology underlying the PISA 2009 survey. It examines additional features related to the implementation of the project at a level of detail that allows researchers to understand and replicate its analyses. The reader will find a wealth of information on the test and sample design,…

Evaluation reports increasingly document the degree of program implementation, particularly the extent to which programs adhere to prescribed steps and procedures. Many reports are cursory, however, and few, if any, fully portray the long and winding path taken when developing evaluation instruments, particularly observation instruments. In this…

This article presents an approach to systematic reviews that combines the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice standards and the realist notion of contexts-mechanisms-outcomes (CMO) configurations. Both approaches have their advantages and drawbacks, and the authors will make a case for combining both approaches to profit from their advantages…

This article provides the background and describes the processes involved in establishing a national approach to benchmarking the way universities engage with their local and regional communities in Australia. Local and regional community engagement is a rapidly expanding activity in Australian public universities and is increasingly being seen as…

Described are 28 special education exemplary programs and 34 programs that have been adapted for use with the handicapped. It is explained that each has been reviewed and validated as exemplary by the Joint Dissemination Review Panel of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Arranged alphabetically by project name, listings include…

Intended as an aid in the selection of software techniques and tools, this document contains three sections: (1) a suggested methodology for the selection of validation, verification, and testing (VVT) techniques and tools; (2) summary matrices by development phase usage, a table of techniques and tools with associated keywords, and an…

Discusses programs at the school district and intermediate service district level to build banks of promising programs that were developed at the local level. (IRT)

This instructional note describes the successful application and adaptation of teacher-student conference techniques as suggested by Donald M. Murray in his book "A Writer Teaches Writing." Athanasourelis states that while he believes that Murray overestimates students' abilities when he describes the conference process as "the working talk of…

Focusing on issues related to the training of industrial workers in Brazil, this article reports the findings of a study which evaluated the effectiveness of vocational training offered by the National Industrial Apprenticeship Service. (LRA)