Students have different levels of motivation, different attitudes about teaching and learning, and different responses to specific classroom environments and instructional practices. The more thoroughly instructors understand the differences, the better chance they have of meeting the diverse learning needs of all of their students. Three categories of diversity that have been shown to have important implications for teaching and learning are differences in students ’ learning styles (characteristic ways of taking in and processing information), approaches to learning (surface, deep, and strategic), and intellectual development levels (attitudes about the nature of knowledge and how it should be acquired and evaluated). This article reviews models that have been developed for each of these categories, outlines their pedagogical implications, and suggests areas for further study.

Collaborative tools have been used in educational contexts for supporting communication and collaboration among students, discussions about topics, cooperative problem resolution, knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge construction. A proper use of these tools reduces student isolation in web-based courses and facilitates the development of personal and social skills. At the same time, it is generally assented that learning styles are the preferences of students regarding to how they learn. It is desirable that a web-based instructional system includes information about the student learning style to optimally adapt the whole course to the individual characteristics of the students. Due to the benefits of the use of learning styles in adaptive hypermedia systems and the benefits of collaboration, we propose the use of learning styles to automatically adapt collaborative activities in web-based systems. Learning styles can be taken into account by proposing or discouraging collaborative activities, grouping students and choosing the most suitable statement of the problem and collaborative tools for each group of students. 1

several years to develop a series of virtual reality ( VR) based computer modules for use in undergraduate engineering education. The goals of this work have been threefold: 1. To produce modules with as much practical use to as many students as possible.

This article has four distinct but related purposes. First, we describe the research setting for assessing human information processing style in terms of the rationalintuitive complementarity. We highlight earlier management study that directly deals with this dimension. Then we review popular instruments for assessing style in rational-intuitive terms. Second, we outline a conceptual model that elaborates the rational-intuitive styles of human information processing into three modes each. There are innovative management studies, and Eastern and Western philosophical bases for this model. We use this background to help synthesize three lines of neurophysiological research to formulate a six-mode human information processing (HIP) metaphor. Third, we use the HIP metaphor to develop an HIP survey with a scale for each mode. This section describes how conceptual definitions are derived from the model with guidance from the rational-intuitive term pairs and the survey item pool. Fina...

This paper reports on a new undergraduate course at Florida Atlantic University titled: “Introduction to Inventive Problem Solving in Engineering”. The goal is to enhance inventive thinking abilities of undergraduate students resulting in skills that can be used in science, math, engineering and technology. The course is focused on developing thinking skills that stay with the students, and is based on: a) well established systematic and non-systematic approaches to inventive problem solving, b) results from NSF support to FAU on unified frame for inventive

Abstract—Due to its importance as a model for several software and hardware applications, automata theory is a core topic in computer science and engineering education. But because of its abstract mathematical nature automata is used to be taught by traditional lecture-driven style. Virtual reality and web-based learning can provide automata learners with a unique experience such as interactive learning, simulation opportunities, visualizations of abstract concepts, etc. In this paper a web-based virtual environment for automata theory, as an example, is introduced in addition to an evaluation of its use in context. Index Terms—Virtual reality, web-based learning, automata theory. I.

For the past sixty years, ecologists have been arguing about what an ecosystem is, and the

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The main purpose of this paper is to outline a holistic answer to the following question: How to deal with problematic situations? A framework of a modern approach, a new meta-discipline, based on knowledge and experience from several other disciplines will be presented. We are focusing in those social interventions where the participation of both the user or clients and the facilitators or advisers is required. In these experiences group work are social processes of central importance. In addition, the art of facilitation will also be discussed. Moreover, different problem solving approaches, methods and techniques will be presented. The paper ends with a selective list of references to different disciplines that has given background to the many concepts and approaches presented in this paper.

Abstract: A set of computer-based experiments are reported that investigate the understanding achieved by learners when studying a complex domain (statistics) in a real E-learning environment using three different media combinations – Text only, Text and Diagrams and Spoken Text and Diagrams, and the results agree with earlier work carried out on more limited domains. The work is then extended to examine how student interaction and student learning styles affect the learning outcomes. Different responses to the media combinations are observed and significant differences occur between learners classified as Sensing and Reflective learners. The experiment also identified some important differences in performance with the different media combinations by students registered as Dyslexic. The experiment was therefore repeated with a much larger sample of Dyslexic learners and the earlier effects were found to be significant. The results were surprising and may provide useful guidance for the design of material for Dyslexic students. 1.