Student discussions are a common teaching approach in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses because of their benefits to student learning, and to future professional development for natural resources professionals. However, traditional student-led discussions often are ineffective at meeting course and learning objectives and suffer from…

This article focuses on the special role of students as discussion leaders and their engagement in the facilitation of online discussion in relation to the teacher's role. The methodology combined quantitative data of students' frequency behaviour with qualitative analysis of students' individual online contributions. Each contribution was…

An imaginary consultant (with some resemblance to the author), makes a survey of graduate student-faculty relations and their views of their decision-making roles. The results of the survey are intended to guide deans of graduate schools in emerging institutions in working out suitable roles for graduate students in academic decision making. Based…

Many of those who oppose student participation in academic governance argue that the students are not qualified to plan essentially professional services. This is not what most students want; they want to be acknowledged and taken into account. They want to participate in the governance of the university not out of a desire for power, but to…

The participation of graduate students in academic decision making is not only desirable, but necessary and inevitable. The momentum of the reforms at the undergraduate level is now carrying over to graduate schools. Students no longer consider graduate education a privilege, but a right to advanced training and to something beside a "worthless"…

Continues the discussion on graduate seminars begun in the authors' article "Rethinking the Graduate Seminar." States that the goal of the article was to encourage dialogue about how to teach the graduate seminar effectively. Addresses the responses from the other articles in this issue of "Teaching Sociology." (CMK)

Research has documented that individuals feel a greater sense of responsibility and commitment to an organization when they are active members in organizational decision making. To investigate the level of student involvement in doctoral level counseling psychology programs, student involvement surveys were completed in the spring of 1983, by 28…

This qualitative research study used the interactional sociolinguistics approach (Goffman, 1959; Gumperz, 1982) to analyze the expectations of learners and tutors participating in the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) Drop-in-Center (DIC) environment. Analysis focused on the learners' and tutors' expectations of the conversation and participation…

This study explored what factors influenced learner participation in two sections of a graduate online course at a Midwestern university. Findings indicated that online learner participation and patterns of participation are influenced by the following factors: technology and interface characteristics, content area experience, student roles and…

For the thirty-sixth year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Anaheim, California. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two…

This paper presentes a case study of an innovative class at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) in an English for Academic purposes context in which spontaneous topics raised by the learners took the place of a pre-planned syllabus. The target students were late-matriculating research students and those with particularly weak spoken English.…