Geologic time is a crucial component of any geoscientist’s training. Essential knowledge of geologic time includes rates of geologic processes and the associated time it takes for geologic features to form, yet measuring conceptual thinking abilities in these domains is challenging. We describe development and initial application of the Landscape Identification and Formation Test (LIFT), a conc...

Can ““Information Age”” learners effectively multi-task in the classroom? Can synchronous classroom activities be designed around conceptually related tasks, to encourage deeper processing and greater learning of classroom content? This research was undertaken to begin to address these questions. In this study, we explored the use of instructionally-related instant messaging (IM) discussions du...

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES The Socratic method has long been a traditional teaching method in medicine and law. It is currently accepted as the standard of teaching in clinical wards, while the didactic teaching method is widely used during the first 2 years of medical school. There are arguments in support of both styles of teaching. MATERIALS AND METHODS After attending a radiology conference...

Recent research has led to the emergence of ontology-based question generation and aims to benefit instructors by providing support and intelligent assistance for the automatic generation of questions. However, existing ontologies are not designed mainly for this purpose, and the concern is that an ontology will not be competent enough to act as a semantic source for the question generation pro...

Recently, there has been a wide interest in the massive open online courses (MOOCs) that are freely available to the students from all over the world. Due to the large scale of MOOCs, the instructors (even with their teams of graders) cannot assess all the examinations and quizzes themselves. Peer grading eases the assessment burden but has its shortcomings. Ideally, the assessments should be f...

PURPOSE Standardized patients (SPs) tend to rate medical students' communication skills subjectively and comprehensively, in contrast to such objective skill set defined in the clinical performance examination (CPX). Meanwhile, medical school instructors have a different approach in their evaluation of students' communication skills. We aim to analyze medical students' verbal communication skil...