Meaningful Educational Experience Research Articles

Enhancing Student and Team Learning with Interactive Marketing Simulations

Interactive simulations let educators use technology to increase the involvement and realism of marketing education for individual students and student teams. The article develops team learning theory and integrates it with a model of the learning stages for interactive simulations. The use of interactive simulations with face-to-face and virtual teams in campus and distance learning environments and future technological developments are also discussed. Guidelines are provided to ensure a meaningful educational experience for students, student teams and marketing educators.

Curriculum Integration Positions and Practices in Art Education

Issues of school reform regarding teaching for understanding and knowledge fragmentation have influenced teachers, including art teachers, to work across curriculum divisions. This paper examines art education practices using interpretations of curriculum integration positions from the field of education. Discourse analysis1 was used as the research method to contextually situate and analyze four art curricular paradigms: using the arts as resources for other disciplines; enlarging organizing centers through the arts; interpreting subjects, ideas, or themes through the arts; and understanding life-centered issues through meaningful educational experiences.

Keeping Our Customers Happy: Myths and Management Issues in “Client-Led” Student Software Projects

In this paper we seek to dispel some of the myths and to address some of the real managerial issues which we believe may have deterred academics from involving commercial and industrial partners as customers in students' software project work. We contend that students know when a project is phoney, when requirements are dreamt up by academics and when the deliverables are of no practical use once a project mark has been assigned. The involvement of an external customer materially affects students' motivation, the quality of work that they produce and their sense of achievement. Put simply, authenticity is the key to a rich, challenging and meaningful educational project experience.

Using Industrial Summer Intern Programs as a Tool for Engineering Education

AbstractGlobal competition and rapid changes in technology are creating a greater need for cooperation between academia and industry. One well‐established tool for promoting cooperation is the summer intern program. Unfortunately, there is limited literature regarding how these programs promote engineering education. This paper documents the objectives, methodology, and results of Project ProbeSM—a unique summer intern program offered by American Electric Power (AEP) to provide qualified engineering students with meaningful education and work experiences in electric power generation under the direct supervision of engineering faculty. This program attempts to foster cooperation between academia and the power industry, enhance the education of future engineers in areas of critical need to the industry, provide a breadth of “real‐life” experiences for the development of engineering faculty, and benefit the host corporation. It is hoped that Project Probe could serve as the basis for a viable model for development of similar programs.

Cultural Contexts That Influence Learning and Academic Performance

When students experience academic or behavioral difficulties, examining their learning experiences from an ecological perspective provides a much broader understanding of the relationships between culture, learning, and academic performance. The value of the systems approach to viewing culture is that it points to the limitations of focusing on a single aspect of the interactions between culture and academic performance. As we move to articulate an integrated, inclusive educational system, we must develop programs and services that are responsive to the diverse sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds of the students and families we serve so that all children participate in equally meaningful educational experiences.

Enhancing Racial Understanding: A Class Visit to a Black University

After 20 years, students recalled a race relations class as one of their most meaningful and profound educational experiences. The course, taught in the “deep South” during the early 1970s by a licensed psychologist, included experiential components: a required seven-day, live-in home visit and a visit to a predominantly black college or university. These experiential aspects provided important opportunities for students to explore racial attitudes and beliefs that had been discussed in class, in “real world” contexts. Twenty years later, black and white students were interviewed about their recall of the significance of the course, the live-in home visit, and the visit to a black institution. Observations are included which may be of benefit to others who consider designing a similar educational experience.

HELIOS Education Gold Award Winner

ABSTRACT This paper describes a collaborative project between the staff of twelve mainstream schools and Suffolk Local Education Authority staff which has aimed to develop differentiated teaching strategies. The project has developed teaching and assessment techniques for pupils with literacy difficulties and approaches to delivering aspects of the whole curriculum to pupils with special educational needs. The project recognizes the central importance of mainstream teachers if integration for pupils with special educational needs is to be a truly meaningful educational experience.

Integrating Global Concepts Into the Business Curriculum: A U.K. Perspective

Abstract Business education has a responsibility to provide students with a meaningful educational experience in the area of globalization. Students must be offered an opportunity to understand how business operates in an international setting and how their lives will be affected by a global environment. But how do business educators alleviate the problem of teaching globalization with little or no pedagogical training in international knowledge, skills, and attitudes? One approach to gaining a knowledge base is by visiting a foreign country. The visitation should incorporate formal classroom training and personal experience in the host country. This firsthand knowledge about a foreign land can then be combined with an infused curriculum that includes such concepts as the history, culture, political structure, economic system, legal system, and communication practices of the foreign country.

A Feminist Approach to Teaching Learning Theory with Educational Applications

The book Women's Ways of Knowing (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986) and its suggested educational methodologies were used to teach a learning theory course. I minimized lecturing, promoted discussion, and shared the educational process in a variety of ways. Assignments included a case study of students' own “ways of knowing,” a group presentation, and the construction of a theory of learning and an educational system implied by it. Students positively evaluated the case study, the Belenky et al. book, and the course in general, suggesting that these methods may lead to a meaningful educational experience for women.

Criterion-Referenced Tests

before, during, and after class to attempt to make mass instruction a meaningful educational experience. In order for a student to be certified as an educated layman, many schools require that he achieve a minimum grade point average in a broad range of courses, that he demonstrate competence in a particular field of study, that he be educated in computer or foreign languages, and that he swim one hundred yards or drown trying. Such requirements, for better or worse, mean that many stu dents will be enrolled in lecture-discussion courses as un derclassmen. This being the case, the classroom format typical of these courses must be closely examined. The modest revisions to the lecture-discussion method of fered here provide a reasonable means of educating large classes without the high cost and major revisions usually necessary in the use of educational technology (1). It should be quite plain, however, that there are no easy routes to improving the service course, nor are there any panaceas for the problems associated with it. It is hoped that this brief essay will stimulate changes in existing methods of instruction and encourage the exploration of new ways to teach required courses.