Education Commons^™

Constructive Alignment And The Curriculum: A Call For Improved Pedagogical Practices In Higher Education, Kerwin A. Livingstone

Kerwin A. Livingstone

From the turn of the century, there have been fervent calls to reform the curriculum in such a way that all students benefit. In light of heated debates, ‘constructivism’ was embraced as the new learning theory that would cause an improvement in student learning outcomes. Much later, ‘constructive alignment’ emerged, which sought to revolutionise the curriculum, significantly modifying pedagogical practices. Consequently, this article seeks to address constructive alignment in the curriculum and the urgent need to improve didactic practices in higher education. To this end, a discussion ensues on the curriculum and its necessity in pedagogy. The different approaches to …

Implementing A Qep In A Distributed University When Memories Are Short And Changes Are Necessary, Aaron Clevenger, Kelly Whealan George

Aaron D. Clevenger

The Relationship Between Online College Students' Learning Style And Response To Literature, Katie Robinson

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Students entering the "Composition and Literature" classroom find themselves presented with a number of challenges as they learn to analyze literature beyond reader comprehension. The online learner experiences even more obstacles while approaching an often-difficult curriculum without the guidance of a residential instructor. For this reason, the online learner must adapt and develop autonomy in learning. Reader Response literary critics place great emphasis on the reader while determining meaning in a text, and Louise Rosenblatt explored the connection between the reader and the text in her Transactional Theory. To assist online learners in their endeavor, this study aimed to determine …

An Investigation Of Student Perspectives On Classroom Resource Usefulness, Joshua Randall, Lindsey Thompson

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Central to the post-secondary education is the textbook, and central to complaints regarding post-secondary education is also the textbook. Textbook use and price are a serious issue at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and at other colleges and universities around the country. Concern regarding textbooks inspires students to become very vocal, filing complaint after complaint regarding the price, the quality, and the utilization of textbooks in the status quo. This is an issue that inflames the hearts (and empties the wallets) of many students, and therefore should be an issue of concern with the university. In two separate studies surveying students …

Learning And Teaching Effectiveness In The Digital Age: A Case Study From A Pacific Tertiary Education Provider, Kerwin A. Livingstone

Kerwin A. Livingstone

The last few decades have seen the dramatic increase in online education in different parts of the world, at different universities. Such a change has been necessitated due to the changing scenes in tertiary learning and teaching, the need to offer students more meaningful options, and the need to embrace student learning diversity. Technology-based education, rightly designed and implemented, provides students with sound educational experiences. The aim of this study is to give a panoramic view of how an online programme is run at one of New Zealand’s Polytechnics, the Open Polytechnic. With this information, all current and prospective online …

Conceptual Framework Alignment Between Primary Literature And Education In Animal Behaviour, Andrea Marie-Kryger Bierema

Dissertations

In 1963, Tinbergen revolutionized the study of animal behaviour in his paper On aims and methods of ethology (Zeitschrift Tierpsycholgie, 20, 410-433) by revamping the conceptual framework of the discipline. His framework suggests an integration of four questions: causation, ontogeny, survival value, and evolution. The National Research Council Committee (U.S.) on Undergraduate Biology Education to Prepare Research Scientists for the 21^st Century published BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2003), which suggests alignment between current research and undergraduate education. Unfortunately, alignment has been rarely studied in college biology, especially for fundamental …

College Dreams À La Mexicana . . . Agency And Strategy Among American-Mexican Transnational Students, Nolvia A. Cortez Román, Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Drawing from in-depth interviews with university-level transnational students in Mexico, we highlight these students’ resistance and agency in the face of US legal and educational policies that have marginalized them and other undocumented students. We also illustrate pitfalls and possibilities that students encounter in a Mexican system that has not anticipated their presence. The interviewed students viewed return migration for higher education in Mexico as a strategy that could allow them to access/develop their imagined identities as college-educated professionals and one day, legalized citizens of the United States. At the time they made their decisions, before Deferred Action for Childhood …

Logging In To Learning Analytics, Edna J. Pressler

Current Issues in Emerging eLearning

According to the most recent Higher Education Editions of the Horizon Report (Johnson et al., 2013; Johnson, Adams, & Cummins, 2012; Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine, & Haywood, 2011), learning analytics (LA) is an emerging technology that will be widely adopted within the next few years. In this article, I use the McKinsey 7S Model (Waterman, Peters, & Phillips, 1980) as a way to organize a review of the learning analytics (LA) literature, in order to help organizational leaders assess and increase an organization’s readiness for LA. More specifically, I identify the 7 areas of an organization that need to be …

Students' Competency -- The Intersection Of Didactics And Organisation Of Higher Education, Peter Slepcevic-Zach, Ph.D.

International Journal for Business Education

Output orientation in the realm of education has become a requirement for higher education that is now slowly starting to be manifested in its curricula. This raises the question: what competences students are supposed to develop in the course of their studies and how these competences can be developed. In a first step, this article will therefore deal with the notion of competence. The next step involves an analysis of the various approaches to didactics in higher education, which plays an important role in the promotion of students' competency as well as in the design of individual lesson plans and …

Curriculum, Marginalization, And The Professoriate, William L. White

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

The author exposes the subtext on which education and particularly curriculum making is based by focusing on the notion that the professoriate has been marginalized within curriculum planning by an educational hegemony that utilizes the sorting and classification mechanisms present in schooling to co-opt the development of educational plans.

Acer Senior Years Learning Framework: Standard Level Course Manual, Doug Mccurry

Curriculum development and review

The Senior Years Learning Framework (SYLF) is a new national program developed by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) for students in the final years of secondary school. The SYLF was designed to provide a broad learning experience integrating personal development and academic skills with an extended practical workplace component. SYLF Standard has been designed for students interested in moving directly to work or further vocational education at the completion of secondary school. This stream has an emphasis on the development of literacy, numeracy and ICT literacy skills. SYLF Advanced is a framework for study that is tailored for …

Peer Collaboration: Improving Teaching Through Comprehensive Peer Review, Shelley L. Smith

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This article includes a brief rationale and review of the literature on peer review of teaching (PRT). Based on that literature review, it offers a proposal for an optimal formative review process that results in a teaching portfolio that would reflect a faculty member’s efforts and successes in a critically reflective PRT process, and contributes to ongoing teaching improvement. It then looks at potential areas of faculty resistance and concern and offers a discussion of potential strategies to overcome those concerns.

Teaching Acceptance Of Differences And Equality Across General Education Curricula: Changing Perspectives On Multiculturalism And Social Acceptance Through Transformative Learning, Merrill Andrea Mayper

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

As the United States becomes more diverse nation, institutions of higher learning continue to promote diversity education on their campuses. The purpose of this study was to go beyond courses designed to teach cultural diversity specifically, and to discover how higher education faculty could include lessons on acceptance of difference and equality in the various disciplines of general education taught in today's colleges and universities. Faculty could thereby create an opportunity for students to challenge their mental models and, through transformative learning, change their perceptions on how they view the world. Using the Delphi method, this study brought together a …