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This study aimed at designing a model of instructional materials for Academic Writing Course focusing on research paper writing. The model was designed based on the Curriculum at the English Education Study Program, Faculty of Language and Art Education of IKIP PGRI Bojonegoro, East Java, Indonesia. This model was developed in order to improve students' skill in writing research paper which is one of the prerequisite tasks before graduating from university. The steps of this research and development consist of needs analysis, document analysis, model design, model development, and model experimentation. The researchers conducted needs analysis to the fifth semester students and three academic writing teachers, in order to generate information dealing with the students' needs in academic writing course materials. The needs analysis and documents analysis were dug up through questionnaire, interview, and discussion among students and academic writing teachers. The documents analyzed in this study were syllabus, lesson plan, and the existing textbook. The model design used is derived from Borg and Gall (1983) and Sukmadinata (2008), in which there are four steps, i.e. (1) exploration phase; (2) model development phase; (3) model experimentation phase; and (4) dissemination and model implementation phase. The results of needs analysis questionnaire reveal that students need to be taught how to write academic writing in terms of journal article since it will be the final project of the students at the end of their study in university. Instructional materials with different strategies focused on research paper writing are needed by the students.

This study is meant to examine the thesis quality of students of English Department at IAIN Samarinda. Through the descriptive-quantitative research, the thesis quality of students of English Department at IAIN Samarinda is reviewed from the aspects of language, structure, concepts understanding, theoretical framework, methodology, content, writing mechanism, and references used. This study also tries to figure out any factors that affect the thesis quality of English Department students. Fourteen English Department Students' thesis tested in 2013 are used as the main data. In addition, other data are obtained from respondents i.e. 19 students, and informants i.e. lecturers of English Department who are also their thesis advisors. The result shows that the average score of thesis written by 14 English Department students at IAIN Samarinda academic year of 2013 is 3.16 which is in the range of 2.61-3.40 scale, which is quite good quality. This quality is relevant with the informants' perceptions about the quality of thesis written by their students. Judging from some aspects, they assume that their students are able to write a good quality of thesis with an average score of 2.81 which is at a scale of 2.61-3.40. The quality is affected by internal factors and external factors. The most decisive internal factor is the respondents' low score of writing with appropriate and acceptable structure in English. This is the effect of respondents' lack of ability of composing adequate paragraphs in English. Meanwhile, the most concerning external factor is the quality of learning structure course and the professionalism of the informants in guiding the students to improve their writing ability in thesis writing. A bibliography is included.

This paper focuses on students' reading habits--whether traditional reading habits (print books) or modern reading habits (using a computer screen). We review the changes in students' reading habits over time, as part of other global changes, and explore whether corresponding digital pedagogies have evolved to address these changes. We examine Generation Y students' motivations and study habits, a generation that shows indications of changes in its academic values and priorities, and cracks in its research skills for a global world. We focus on a case study of the reading habits of students in one academic institution and discuss the implications of the findings for academic teaching and the academia's traditional role of training researchers.

Recently, electronic books (e-books) have become prevalent amongst the general population, as well as students, owing to their advantages over traditional books. In South Africa, a number of schools have integrated tablets into the classroom with the promise of replacing traditional books. In order to realise the potential of e-books and their associated devices within an academic context, where reading speed and comprehension are critical for academic performance and personal growth, the effectiveness of reading from a tablet screen should be evaluated. To achieve this objective, a quasi-experimental within subjects design was employed in order to compare the reading speed and comprehension performance of 68 students. The results of this study indicate the majority of participants read faster on an iPad, which is in contrast to previous studies that have found reading from tablets to be slower. It was also found that comprehension scores did not differ significantly between the two media. For students, these results provide evidence that tablets and e-books are suitable tools for reading and learning, and therefore, can be used for academic work. For educators, e-books can be introduced without concern that reading performance and comprehension will be hindered.

It is generally perceived that a substantial number of engineering faculty are still unaware of alternative educational methods, and many who are aware of them choose not to incorporate them into their approach to teaching. There are several likely reasons for this inertia, aside from the inevitable human resistance to change. The primary focus of imparting information is restricted to fulfilling the course requirements and, the upcoming term end examination. It is imperative to adopt a change from teaching to learning paradigm engaging the students in Higher Order Thinking Skills. Knowledge and technological advancements are changing the role of engineering and engineering faculty in the society. Engineering Education reforms need to focus on inductive teaching and stimulated learning. Students should be taught critical thinking skills and creative thinking skills to keep pace with the rapidly changing engineering profession. This paper reports the study done to test and explore the faculty awareness of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in the cognitive domain and Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) and to evaluate question papers set by engineering faculty with respect to HOTS as proposed by Bloom's Taxonomy. Various active learning strategies to enhance critical thinking skills and creative thinking skills of the students are recommended for use by the faculty in their interactions with the students.

The purposes of this study were to investigate the effects of the use of paper-based and weblog-based electronic portfolios on the writing achievement of limited English proficiency students, to survey the students' attitudes towards the use of the portfolio assessment, and to compare the viewpoints of the students in the control and experimental groups. The study was conducted with 60 second-year hotel and tourism students enrolled in the Writing for the Service Industry course. They had limited English proficiency, as their previous English grades were C or below in average. The simple random sampling technique was used for subject selection and group assignment. Google's free weblog website (located at www.blogger.com) was used as a tool for creating and developing the students' personal electronic portfolios. At the beginning of the course, the students in the control group and the experimental group were trained in the concept of portfolios, and the purposes, content, and criteria used for assessment were discussed with the students. A writing achievement test and a closed-ended questionnaire were used for the quantitative data collection, while the qualitative data were gathered from the open-ended questions, interviews, and reflection. Descriptive statistics and t-tests were employed for the data analysis. It was found that the effects of the use of paper-based portfolios and weblog-based electronic portfolios on the writing achievement were not significantly different, but some promising results of the use of weblog-based electronic portfolios for language learning and assessment are indisputable.

University education has been massified in South Africa and this has disrupted conventions and practices of assessment. Universities are perceived as promoting complex achievements and complex skills through rigorous curriculum specifications and assessment instruments. Due to experiences in high school and the novelty of university education, students have begun to enquire about the "scope of the paper." This enquiry has tended to destabilise the reliability of assessments and judgments in universities in South Africa. Grades and symbols certified by some universities have become both indeterminate and ambiguous. A qualitative, quantitative design was adopted to identify and interrogate university research participants' views on experiences about examinations at university level. In the process, the meanings that first-year degree-level test-takers ascribed to the concept of "the scope of the paper" were unpacked. It was determined which aspects of the test scope students had studied in order to prepare for tests. Inferences were made about the concepts that the students marginalised because they were perceived to be "out of the scope" of the examination. A holistic and broad educational experience for university students is recommended in spite of the daunting numbers enrolled in certain university courses.

Electronic portfolios offer many advantages to their paper-based counterparts, including, but not limited to working on ICT skills, adding multimedia and easier sharing of the portfolio. Previous research showed that the quality of a portfolio does not depend on the medium used. In this article the perceived support for self-reflection of an electronic portfolio and a paper-based portfolio in the same ecological setting are compared. We made use of the fact that during this study about half of the first year medical students was using an electronic portfolio (n = 157) and the other half a paper-based portfolio (n = 190). Nine questions were added to the standard end of the block evaluation, which is handed to 25 percent of year one educational groups. Findings suggest that perceptions about the support for self-reflection, and the usefulness of compiling a portfolio, do not differ between students using an electronic portfolio and students using a paper-based portfolio.

This paper builds upon the theoretical framework developed by Zahra and George (2002) to empirically explore, first, the moderator effect of principals' inspirational vision content as a social mechanism that reduces the gap between potential absorptive capacity (PACAP; the ability to acquire and assimilate external knowledge) and realized absorptive capacity (RACAP; the ability to transform and exploit this external knowledge to school processes); and second, the relationship between RACAP and long-term school outcomes (teachers' absenteeism 1 year later). Based on a sample of 600 teachers from 100 elementary schools in Israel, results showed that the relationship between PACAP and RACAP is not conditioned by principals' inspirational vision content. The latter and PACAP predicted RACAP separately. Further, RACAP was negatively correlated with teacher absenteeism. This study provides a deeper understanding of the ACAP model in the school context and opens new avenues to exploring the social integration mechanism between PACAP and RACAP. It also adds a new construct to predict teacher absenteeism over the long term.

Within the existing system of education, student work rarely has any value beyond the particular course that it is created for. The work is graded and then usually discarded. The authors describe in this article a way that student work can be systematically made available for use by others beyond the immediate learning context within which it is created. They provide a case study in which this mechanism worked. They describe the benefits and costs of doing this, along with the broader implications this systematic publication of exemplary student work might have for the changing relationship between learning and doing, between education and the rest of society. This publication mechanism, called OPEER (open publishing of exemplary educational resources), can enable education to have an additional major positive impact on the rest of society, creating and maintaining quality-assured resources at a minimal additional cost. (Contains 1 figure.)

When respondents answer paper-and-pencil (PP) questionnaires, they sometimes modify their responses to correspond to previously answered items. As a result, this response bias might artificially inflate the reliability of PP questionnaires. We compared the internal consistency of PP questionnaires to computerized questionnaires that presented a different number of items on a computer screen simultaneously. Study 1 showed that a PP questionnaire's internal consistency was higher than that of the same questionnaire presented on a computer screen with one, two or four questions per screen. Study 2 replicated these findings to show that internal consistency was also relatively high when all questions were shown on one screen. This suggests that the differences found in Study 1 were not due to the difference in presentation medium. Thus, this paper suggests that reliability measures of PP questionnaires might be inflated because of a response bias resulting from participants cross-checking their answers against ones given to previous questions. (Contains 1 table and 2 footnotes.)

Background Research theses can have a significant impact on the development of applied sciences, especially when their results are published. Objective This study aims to determine publication rate of papers extracted from the medical residency and master’s degree theses of Guilan University of Medical Sciences (GUMS) during 2008-2018. Methods This is a descriptive cross-sectional study. The data were collected from the medical residency and master’s degree theses of GUMS from 2008 to 2018. Then, they were searched in international and national databases according to the title, keywords, and names of supervisors, advisors, and students. Results Of 774 theses, 449 (58 %) papers had been extracted and published in journals indexed by ISI/ PubMed (41.2%), Scopus (11.8%), BIOSIS, Chemical Abstract, and Embase (0.44%) and others (46.56%). Most of them (98.66%) were original research. Moreover, in 383(85.3%) of the theses, there was no statistician or data advisor. The median time from defending theses to the publication of a paper from them was two years. Conclusion The publication of papers extracted from the theses of GUMS has increased, and more than 50% of them have been published in journals indexed by ISI, PubMed, and Scopus. However, the factors associated with the publication of papers need to be surveyed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a research project comprising data from an interview study and a survey with teachers and school principals in four German federal states ("Bundesländer"), this paper questions the claim that the side effects of accountability in education are bound to high-stakes contexts, and also provides evidence of side effects occurring in no- and low-stakes contexts. The findings suggest that side effects cannot be fully explained by certain implementation features of accountability regimes (e.g., high stakes), but should rather be understood as a result of implementation features as well as systematic effects of accountability in education.

Research on note taking in pedagogical settings has received considerable attention. However, the awkwardness of integrating information across different media formats may present physical and cognitive barriers that prevent students from effectively organizing annotations from both printed and digital content while studying paper textbooks. The purpose of this paper is to develop a cross-media annotation system that incorporates a paper textbook with a computer as an integrated whole to facilitate the question-driven organization of annotations. While taking notes, students can digitally extract printed text and organize the copied passages based on guiding questions, all by using digital pens. Students can also link Internet-based learning resources to printed content to supplement their print-based studies. A user-based formative evaluation was conducted to assess the new functions of the cross-media annotation system and to explore their influence on students' note-taking behavior and performance. The results show that the new functions may facilitate the retention of key concepts of the paper textbooks and may improve knowledge construction based on explicit learning goals. (Contains 1 table and 7 figures.)

The purpose of this study was to test whether the web version is an alternative to the paper version of the short version of the World Health Organization Quality of Life assessment (WHOQOL-BREF). Two studies were conducted. Study 1 used crossover self-controlled trials with 80 participants to compare the web and paper versions and to determine the test-retest reliability of the web version. Study 2 used data from 1,016 web participants to analyze the internal consistency and concurrent and construct validity of the web version. The correlations of domain scores between the web and paper versions ranged from 0.71 to 0.85. Dependent t tests showed no significant differences in domain scores between these two versions. The intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) for test-retest reliability of web version ranged from 0.79 to 0.91. The Cronbach's alpha for internal consistency reliability ranged from 0.60 to 0.83. Multiple regression models indicated that the web version has good concurrent validity. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for the second-order hierarchical factor model also supported the construct validity of the web version. The web version of the WHOQOL-BREF can be the alternative to the paper version for health-related quality of life (HR-QOL) evaluation.

This study details the procedure and results of developing a mission statement at a language institute for the purpose of obtaining a program accreditation from an international language commission. A serious self-study process results in the development of a solid, true and ambitious mission since the mission covers all areas related to achieving students learning outcomes. It shows how the mission was changed and why. It also details how the new mission resulted in the improving quality, especially in the areas of curriculum and professional development of faculty and staff. Other aspects, such as facilities and student affairs were modified to achieve the goals and objectives of the new mission. This essay reports the changes that were implemented during the process of mission statement development. These changes resulted in plans to improve the quality of the English language teaching at the English Language Academy (ELA) which offers an English language program to Foundation Year students whose success in the program is a college requirement at the University of Business and Technology (UBT) in the academic year of 2016-2017. The program also aims at improving the English language proficiency of students so that they can use it in their future professions considering that the university logo is "Education for Job Opportunities." The third main goal or aim is related to the use of English to assist students in personal and social life. Critical thinking surfaced as a main concern of those surveyed for needs assessment. The report concludes with recommending conducting thorough and genuine self-study process which certainly ends with quality improvement. The report uses data collected from five questionnaires completed by students, faculty, alumni and employers of UBT graduates. The purpose of the survey was to identify the needs of the students. Based on those needs, the learning outcomes are identified and accordingly, the new mission statement is developed.

Collecting feedback from students through course, program and other evaluation questionnaires has become a costly and time consuming process for most colleges. Converting to data collection through the internet, rather than completion on paper, can result in a cheaper and more efficient process. This article examines several research questions which need to be answered to establish that results collected by the two modes of administration are equivalent. Data were gathered for a program evaluation questionnaire from undergraduate students at a university in Hong Kong. Students were able to choose between completion on paper or through the internet. In six of the seven Faculties the number of responses through each mode was roughly the same. Students in the Engineering Faculty favored the internet. Scores on the 14 out of 18 scales in the instrument showed small differences by mode of response, which became smaller still with controls for pertinent demographic variables. The main response question addressed in the study was whether there was any difference in the way respondents to the two modes interpreted the questions. The study demonstrated the equivalence of the two data sets by showing that both could be fitted to a common model with structural equation modeling (SEM). Five levels of tests of invariance further confirmed the comparability of data by mode of administration. This study, therefore suggests that changing to internet collection for course and program evaluations will not affect the comparability of ratings.

The purpose of this study was to examine how prospective middle school science teachers understood and identified types of scientific knowledge in a presented vignette. Also, their definitions and views of the relationships between types of scientific knowledge (i.e. scientific facts, concepts, generalizations, theories, and scientific laws) were investigated through open-ended questions. Additionally, participants were given the Nature of Scientific Knowledge Scale (NSKS) after they responded to the open-ended questions. Therefore both qualitative and quantitative data were obtained about their understandings and views about scientific knowledge. Thirty-six participants responded the questionnaires at the end of the spring semester 2005. During this semester participants were in their junior year and enrolled in a "history and nature of science" course in which 16th and 17th century scientific revolution and the historical background leading to those developments were discussed. Participants received no specific instruction about the definitions of types of scientific knowledge like theories and laws. Analysis of the quantitative data obtained via NSKS show that participants hold a view favoring the tentativeness of scientific knowledge and mostly appreciate the developmental nature of science. While, on the other hand, analysis of the qualitative data obtained through the open-ended questions illustrate that participants hold a stepwise development view in science assigning the tentativeness in science to theories and lower steps. Overwhelmingly they emphasize that scientific laws reflect proven truth and in a sense absolute. These findings show the usefulness of utilizing appropriate vignettes for probing views. The results are discussed in the light of existing literature and implications are provided.

In 2007, the Malaysia government initiated twinned primary teacher education arrangements with five Southern Hemisphere higher education institutions (HEIs). Participating students completed their teacher education in both Malaysia and a partner HEI. In this paper, we consider the preliminary findings of a comparative study tracking the beginning teacher journeys of 13 Malaysia based twinning programme graduates and six New Zealand based teachers. The study involved two aspects: (1) a comparative discourse analysis of key Malaysia and New Zealand education policy documents; and (2) thematic and discourse analysis of participants' reflections on their early teaching experiences. Our focus is on beginning teachers as "policy workers": policy subjects whose work is shaped and constrained by policy discourses and imperatives, and policy actors who mediate, translate and resist these. We compare the two policy contexts and consider how policy discourses appeared and were contested in teachers' initial online questionnaire responses.

This paper presents detailed qualitative evidence from a case study of teachers in five Chinese schools in one city. It explicitly seeks to show how developments in government policy towards education have altered the management of teacher labour inside schools as well as the teacher labour process as expressed by the teachers themselves in interviews and questionnaires. In this paper, we explore supervision, work intensification, and the erosion of professionalism. We conclude that some changes have taken place as predicted by the labour process model, but that the reaction of the teachers to more extensive controls has been variable. In particular senior school managers did have greater control with high levels of supervision, but that was generally welcomed as preferable to the previous system of outside control and neglect. While workload increased overall, the teachers were more likely to have to work outside of normal duties rather than experience any increase in formal contractual obligations.

This study assessed the relative degree of association between quality of army life and perceived attributes of different types of leaders. Interviews with one hundred thirty lower ranking enlisted personnel provided information about soldiers' satisfaction with various facets of military experience and their perceptions of the behavior of superiors whom they viewed as either formulating (originators) or merely relaying (givers) daily orders. Regression analyses indicated that satisfaction with both the quality of army life in general and leadership in particular were related more closely to perceived attributes of the originator rather than to such attributes of the giver. This finding is attributed to the originator's greater hierarchical influence within the army structure. (Author)

Postgraduate students need to be equipped with self-determined learning skills in order to meet the demands of higher degree and employment in the fourth industrial revolution (IR 4.0) environment. However, the lack of analysis conducted on item level for validating the measurement of postgraduate students' self-determined learning skills prompted the development of The Postgraduate Self-determined Learning Questionnaire (PSLQ) to fill in the research gaps. This paper aimed to assess the psychometric properties of the newly developed 42-item instrument through a mixed method approach as no study has evaluated the psychometric properties of PSLQ at the item level through Rasch model analysis. Quantitatively, 440 postgraduate students were sampled from a higher education institution in Malaysia to answer the questionnaire. Qualitatively, 10 respondents from science and non-science disciplines were interviewed. The paper reports findings on the psychometric properties of PSLQ through Rasch Rating Analysis and participants' perspectives on the item validity. The results revealed that the items in PSLQ demonstrated good psychometric properties for the measurement of self-determined learning skills of postgraduate students. Implications of the study were discussed in this paper. Future studies can further investigate the psychometric properties of PSLQ according to students' discipline of study.

The objective of this study was to determine how different is the competence of between Junior High School Economic-Social Studies teachers in Indonesia, especially Java and outside of Java. The subjects of this study were teachers who participated in Curriculum 2013 dissemination activities carried out by the Directorate of Elementary and Secondary Education, Department of Education and Culture. Respondents were selected by simple random sampling, namely the Junior High School Economic-Social Studies teachers from Java and outside of Java. Instruments used to collect the data were in the form of questionnaires and documents. The data were analyzed using quantitative analysis. Results showed that the ability of teachers in Indonesia for research have not been evenly distributed proportionally. Junior high school teachers who served in Java have the ability to research better than the teacher outside Java. In Java which has a more complete educational facilities, teacher is easier to access books, research reports, experts, and other resources. The research competence of High School Economic-Social Studies teachers in Java have higher levels of competence of theoretical mastery, cognitive ability, and technical ability than teachers in outside of Java.

Long Zhen,1,2 Gang Wang,1 Gailing Xu,2 Le Xiao,1 Lei Feng,1 Xu Chen,1 Man Liu,1 Xuequan Zhu1 1The National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders and Beijing Key Laboratory of Mental Disorders and Beijing Anding Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100088, People’s Republic of China; 2Tianjin Mental Health Center, Tianjin Anding Hospital, Tianjin 300222, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Gang WangThe National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders & Beijing Key Laboratory of Mental Disorders & Beijing Anding Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100088, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86-13672146258Fax +86-02288188856Email andingyjs@163.comPurpose: Smartphone-based questionnaires have advantages compared with their paper versions, but there is a lack of consistent research on depressive disorder questionnaires. This study aimed to assess the equivalence between the paper and smartphone versions of the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology-Self-Report (QIDS-SR16) and Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) for patients with depressive disorders in psychiatric hospitals in China.Patients and Methods: This was a randomized crossover study of 110 depressed patients recruited from the outpatient department of Beijing Anding Hospital from March 2016 to September 2018. Group 1 completed both the QIDS-SR16 and PHQ-9 in paper format and then completed the smartphone version 1– 2 h later. Group 2 completed the scales in the reverse order. Reliability was evaluated using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) with 95% confidence intervals (CI). The expected ICC was 0.9 (α=0.05).Results: The overall ICC score of the QIDS-SR16 paper and smartphone versions was 0.904 (95% CI: 0.861– 0.934), and the ICCs of each item ranged from 0.769 to 0.923. The overall ICC score of the PHQ-9 paper and smartphone versions was 0.951 (95% CI: 0.929– 0.967), and the ICCs of each item ranged from 0.779 to 0.914.Conclusion: This study demonstrated the equivalence of the paper and smartphone versions of the PHQ-9 and QIDS-SR16 in depressed patients in China.Keywords: depressive disorder, equivalence, intraclass correlation coefficient, questionnaires, smartphone

Relationships between higher education and VET are significant and complex, and of increasing interest in many countries. Most analyses focus on systems, policies and structures. This paper takes a different perspective: what are the learners doing and thinking? It is based on data from research on students commencing study in one sector with experience of study in the other sector. It analyses their characteristics, motivations for study, how they experience study in both sectors and how they perceive their moves. The paper finds that, for these students, their learning trajectories are more circuitous than linear, which raises issues concerning seamlessness, equity and efficiency. Yet pathways are possible, are being used and allow for flexibility. The two educational sectors may be seen as parallel worlds. however, a more apt metaphor may be as tectonic plates creating convergent boundaries. The paper concludes that their relationships require serious rethinking. (Contains 1 figure, 3 tables, and a bibliography.)

A mission statement that identifies the goals and aims of an honors program is a key step in program development. The National Collegiate Honors Council's Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program states unequivocally that a successful honors program "has a clear mandate from the institution's administration in the form of a mission statement or charter document that includes the objectives and responsibilities of honors and defines the place of honors in the administrative and academic structure of the institution." Such mission statements have now become standard for honors programs and colleges. Following a brief history of mission statements outside of the academic world, this paper examines the online mission statements of current honors programs. This study investigates the link between the content of U.S. honors programs' mission statements, goals to be achieved, performance indicators, and outcomes in order to determine if mission statements in the U.S. have served the purpose for which they are designed. Such a determination can offer important guidance to developing honors programs in other parts of the world.

A questionnaire was recently developed for the use with the Spanish-speaking, and evidence have been provided about the construct internal validity by means of structural equation modelling. In this paper, two research questions were considered: (i) What new evidence does application of the Rasch model provide regarding the validity of this construct?; (ii) What cutoffs should be applied to the constructed scales in order to differentiate between acceptable and insufficient levels of the construct being measured? Participants were 1,272 Spanish at both high-school and college level. The instrument is a pencil and paper questionnaire written in Spanish, comprising 20 items (5-point Likert-type scale) distributed evenly across four scales: beyond exact replicas, purpose of models, multiple models, and changing models. Students' responses were coded on an ordinal scale from zero to four. We then conducted a Rasch analysis using both a multidimensional approach and a consecutive unidimensional approach for each dimension. Data provided new evidence regarding the internal validity of the four scales of the questionnaire. The Rasch analysis also allowed us to establish cutoffs for the constructed scales. The evidence provided by this, and the previous study suggest that the questionnaire may be useful as a diagnostic tool when applied to groups or populations of students. In addition, the identified cutoffs could, hypothetically, serve to differentiate between students with an adequate versus an insufficient understanding of the nature of models. [Note: The page range (344-359) shown on the PDF is incorrect. The correct page range for this article is 344-361.]

Recent discoveries about the role of microorganisms in the establishment of the geological conditions in the planet have lead to the development of courses in Geomicrobiology. Unfortunately, most courses are designed for students with a strong Geology background, which is a limitation for universities that lack such courses. To overcome this limitation at our university, we have designed a special topics course entitled Introductory Geomicrobiology that was offered for the first time to undergraduate students from the Biology, Marine Biology and Microbiology Programs. To attract non-geology majors the course included topics such as description of Early Earth ecosystems, search for geo-biological signatures and current approaches in the search for extra-terrestrial life forms. An active learning environment was fostered throughout the course through different activities including oral reports of research papers in the subject, followed by Gallery Runs and class discussions. Our assessment strategies, both formative and summative, revealed that such presentations were an effective way to introduce students to eight main concepts of Geomicrobiology. Student performance was stronger in group discussions than individually, with Gallery Runs as the preferred class discussion technique. Overall, our assessment system proved that the design of the course was effective in teaching Geomicrobiology to nongeology majors.