University teachers provided first year Arts students with hundreds of cinematic images online to analyse as a key part of their predominantly face-to-face undergraduate course. This qualitative study investigates the extent to which the groups engaged in learning involving their analysis of the images and how this was related to their perception…

To succeed in today's economy, students need both proficiency in the "three Rs" (reading, writing and arithmetic) and strong applied skills. Communication skills, team work, and critical thinking have long been at the top of employers' lists of applied skills they seek in employees. States are responding to employers' needs by putting in…

Purpose: At a time when secondary vocational education is implementing competence-based education (CBE) on a large scale, to adapt to the needs of students and of the labour market in a modern society, many vocational schools have recognised that interdisciplinary teacher teams are an important condition for this implementation. In order to…

Focus group interviewing is widely used by academic and applied researchers. Given the popularity and strengths of this method, it is surprising how rarely focus group interviewing is taught in the undergraduate classroom and how few resources exist to support instructors who wish to train students to use this technique. This article fills the gap…

The focus of the paper is to consider the ways in which the cultural complexity inherent in multinational student groups is thrown into relief when participative methods are used. Participative approaches are a means of encouraging students to learn from each other's ideas and experience and, from a critical perspective, as supporting…

Current studies of power, influence tactics, and influence processes in virtual teams assume that these constructs operate in a similar manner as they do in the face-to-face (FtF) environment. However, the virtual context differs from the FtF environment on a variety of dimensions, such as the availability of status cues. The differences between…

In this paper, we present a teaching proposal used in an Introductory Physics course to civil engineering students from Porto's Engineering Institute/Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP). The proposal was born from the need to change students' perception and motivation for learning physics. It consists in the use of an integrator…

This qualitative study explored students' experience of collaborating to undertake a neuromusculoskeletal group research project which was conducted in partial fulfilment of their MSc course. A phenomenological approach was adopted to gain insight into participants' experience of learning and working in a group. Six participants who were all…

Technology continues to evolve and become accessible to students in higher education. Concurrently, teamwork has become an important skill in academia and the workplace and students have adopted established technologies to support their learning in both individual and team project work. Given the emergence of social media technologies, I examined…

Agile development has received increasing interest both in industry and academia due to its benefits in developing software quickly, meeting customer needs, and keeping pace with the rapidly changing requirements. However, agile practices and scrum in particular have been mainly tested in mid- to large-size projects. In this paper, we present…

Self and peer assessment offers benefits for enhancing student learning. Peer moderation provides a convenient solution for awarding individual marks in group assignments. This paper provides a significant review of peer-mark moderation, and describes an award winning, web-based tool that was developed in the UK and is now spreading across the…

The rapid proliferation of technology can have profound effects on the evolution of teaching, learning, scholarship, and governance in higher education (Katz, 2008). However, instructors report that simply "keeping up" with new instructional technologies, let alone integrating them productively into one's teaching, can be a significant…

The authors report findings from a study into students' and teachers' perceptions of the effectiveness of group project work (PW) in promoting students' motivation and learning. The authors gathered students' views on whether PW satisfied their basic psychological needs, affected their motivation, and created opportunities for life skills…

This paper presents the thesis that pair problem-solving serves as an aid to students in developing their metacognitive skills. Metacognition has been defined as knowledge and cognition about cognitive objects and as any kind of monitoring. The ability to monitor one's thoughts and actions is greatly facilitated through the pair problem-solving…

This interview discusses control theory (based on humans' psychological needs for love, power, freedom, and fun) and its potential for transforming students' classroom learning experience. By adopting the teamwork approach used in extracurricular activities, teachers can help students gain satisfaction and a sense of their own importance. (MLH)