Although 20 states have adopted Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), 24 other states have developed their own K-12 science standards based on the same National Research Council (NRC) Framework. Understanding what influences content standards developers, realizing the supports and impediments to implementation they foresee, and knowing their…

The following article examines the implementation and controversy that surround climate change education and the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In order to fully understand why NGSS and climate change education continue to generate significant public debate, one must examine the work of both climate advocates and…

Carnegie Units (CU) quantify the time spent by students in and out of class in terms of content engagement. The rule states that for every one hour spent in a face-to-face setting, students spend an additional two hours of study time or engagement with the material). For colleges offering both online and residential courses with the same content,…

The call to improve undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education can be answered by undergraduate faculty modifying their course content and teaching methods to generate better student outcomes. The National Geoscience Faculty Survey--administered in 2004, 2009, 2012, and 2016--provides evidence that the vast…

Instructors tell stories for pedagogical reasons, but not all classroom stories are necessarily relevant to students and their learning. This study examined how instructors tell stories in ways that students find relevant or irrelevant to their lives. Participants were 388 undergraduate students who responded to an open-ended survey asking them to…

The history of the academic discipline of communication and the subsequent departments that followed are linked in some form or fashion to the evolution of the introductory communication course. Given the prominence and continued relevance of the introductory course in the communication discipline, researchers have conducted surveys for over 60…

What can educators working to develop critical thinking (CT) in their classrooms gain from engaging with the German/Scandinavian tradition of Bildung-centred Didaktik? This article takes up the challenge of how to develop an epistemology of CT that is relational and contextual and gives students the possibility of engaging in ethical debates about…

College educators and administrators have long valued critical thinking as a desired outcome of undergraduate education for its academic, professional, and personal benefits. While researchers have found a number of instructional strategies that promote critical thinking in college, less is known about how these skills transfer to authentic…

The authors describe the politicization of the process to revise Michigan's social studies standards from 2005 to the present. In 2005, critics objected to the omission of topics they considered important, even though the content expectations document was not intended to be an exhaustive list of material to be covered. The latest, more limited…

The flipped classroom approach has grown in various disciplines; however, only few research studies are conducted in social sciences at K-12 settings. This action research investigated the impact of implementing a flipped classroom approach on students' motivation and learning the content knowledge in a suburban high school introductory psychology…

Continuing a tradition dating back to 1968, this tenth study in a longitudinal series of surveys of the basic communication course has two goals: (1) to provide descriptive information about the basic course contemporarily and over time; and (2) to propose a framework for interpreting the impact of the extraordinary national and international…

Schools have implemented the high-impact practice of first-year experience (FYE) courses to assist students with the transition to college. These courses help connect new students to the school with the goal of improving retention. While students in computing majors face the same challenges as other new college students, they also face some…

This paper discusses the utilization of a cultural humility model to educate social work students in understanding the importance of diversity, power, privilege, oppression, marginalization and social and economic justice in an increasingly diverse society. Social work programs are required to teach students to effectively engage a diversity of…

Widespread global interest and adoption of deliberative democracy approaches to reinvigorate citizenship and policymaking in an era of democratic crisis/decline has been mirrored by increasing interest in deliberation in schools, both as an approach to pedagogy and student empowerment and as a training ground for deliberative citizenship. In…

Communication in the real world often entails the interpretation, evaluation, and integration of content from different sources. However, it appears that the ability to integrate content into discourse has not been explicitly scored for in existing studies. This study operationalizes content integration in the analytic scoring of a…