While the challenge of improving young North Americans’ civic engagement seems to lie in the hands of schools, studying alternative ways of teaching citizenship education could benefit the current educational system. In this context, free schools (i.e., schools run democratically by students and teachers), guided by a philosophy that aims at engaging students civically through the democratic activities that they support, offer a relatively unexplored ground for research. The present inquiry is a case study using tools of ethnography and drawing upon some principles of complexity thinking. It aims at understanding students’ citizenship education experiences during democratic activities in a Canadian free school. It describes many experiences that can arise from these activities. They occurred within a school that operated democratically based on a consensus-model. More precisely, they took place during two kinds of democratic activities: class meetings, which regulated the social life of the school, and judicial committees, whose function was to solve conflicts at the school. During these activities, students mostly experienced a combination of feelings of appreciation, concernment and empowerment. While experiencing these feelings, they predominantly engaged in decision-making and conflict resolution processes. During these processes, students modified their conflict resolutions skills, various conceptions, and their participation in democratic activities and in the school. Based on these findings, the study concludes that students can develop certain skills and attitude associated to citizenship education during these activities and become active from a citizenship perspective. Hence, these democratic activities represent alternative strategies that can assist educators in teaching about citizenship.

The impact of Internet technology on critical thinking is of growing interest among researchers. However, there still remains much to explore in terms of how critical thinking can be fostered through online environments for higher education. Ten years ago, Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) published an article describing the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework which provided an outline of three core elements that were able to describe and measure a collaborative and positive educational experience in an online learning environment, namely teaching presence (design, facilitation, and direct instruction), social presence (the ability of learners to project themselves socially and emotionally), and cognitive presence (the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse). This dissertation extends the body of research surrounding the CoI framework and also the literature on developing critical thinking in online environments by examining and exploring the extent to which teaching and social presence contribute to cognitive presence. The researcher was able to do this by offering 189 learners enrolled in 10 research methods courses and educational research courses an opportunity to use an innovative online resource (Research Design Learning Resource – RDLR) to assist them in learning about educational research and developing research proposals. By exploring how participants used this resource the researcher was able to gain insight into what factors contributed to a successful online learning experience and fostered cognitive presence. Quantitative and qualitative research approaches (mixed methods) were used in this study. The quantitative results indicated that both social and teaching presence had a strong positive relationship with cognitive presence and that learners generally perceived to have a positive learning experience using the RDLR. The qualitative findings helped elaborate the significant quantitative results and were organised into the following themes: making connections, multiple perspectives, resource design, being a self-directed learner, learning strategies, learning preferences, and barriers to cognitive presence. Future directions for critical thinking in online environments are discussed.

In the 21st century employers put a higher value than ever before on the interpersonal and thinking competencies of employees such as skills of teamwork, problem solving, and communi-cation, and the capability of creativity as the most important abilities (A. Herrington & J. Her-rington, 2006; Ramsden, 2003). Based on some of these learning theories, J. Herrington and Oliver (2000) further developed an authentic learning framework (p. 30). In this study, I re-ferred to their framework to build a rationale for my research design. The elements of critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration, expressed in this authentic learning framework, are the core concepts in my study.<p> My past teaching experiences in China sparked my interest in the study because I wit-nessed an inconsistency between teaching practices in higher education and the needs of students in schools and workplaces. Further, my learning experiences in Canada as a full-time student deepened my research interest. Thus, I devised the purpose of my study to probe the perceptions of professors in the University of Saskatchewan about their philosophies and practices with re-spect to their undergraduate teaching. I wanted to examine the perceptions of their teaching re-garding the authentic learning process in terms of critical thinking, problem solving, and collabo-ration. My study was a qualitative case study and I used semi-structured interviews to collect the data from six participants with diverse backgrounds from three different disciplines.<p> I organized the findings of the data in the following categories: Understanding of Authentic Learning (which provides the introduction to understanding the authentic learning process); themes of Context, Diversity of Perspectives, and Relationship; and the special theme of Dinas Belief Construction. There were similarities and variations emerging from the data. The varied backgrounds of participants such as their discipline, class size, teaching level, and administrative position appeared to exert influence on the participants perceptions of their teaching. Most of the differences occurred within themes of context and relationship. Apart from the pre-existent features, personal belief was another factor that might be seen to have led to some different perceptions.<p> The data findings provided a foundation to address the level of consistency between the findings and the literature. The discrepancy between my research findings and literature primarily consisted of the conflicting perceptions of teaching practices in relation to collaboration and problem solving. Collaboration was an important area in the literature but the participants per-ceptions of their teaching practices concerning collaboration varied. The adoption of technology in the teaching of my participants (e.g., the use of the Internet and video) was an unexpected finding in my study. Most participants described that the blending of technology in their teaching practices reinforced the cultivation of critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration.<p> Some implications rendered from the discussions are noteworthy for future research. In the belief construction, Dina (2007) described how implicit and explicit beliefs steered students thinking, transformed their behaviors, and eventually enhanced students abilities in critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration. From the constructivist perspective, Dina and Mary (2007) viewed learning as a process of constructing the understanding of diverse contexts in a community. Some teaching practices described by the participants were the special features of a particular discipline. Technology was a new focus in much of the literature of the past 10 years, which was closely linked with real life and collaboration nowadays. In addition, I found that each component of authentic learning (i.e., critical thinking, problem solving, and collabora-tion) deserved further exploration in the future. Although some deficiencies existed, I learned how to design a qualitative case study and these research experiences will become valuable ref-erences for my future research.

The aim of the study is to investigate pre-service middle school mathematics teachers&rsquo / critical thinking processes through statistical and probabilistic knowledge in the context of popular media texts. The study was conducted with a qualitative case study method. Participants of the study consisted of four senior pre-service middle school mathematics teachers enrolled in a public university. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with the participants. Analysis of the data was conducted on the basis of two dimentions / critical thinking skills, and statistical and probabilistic knowledge. The results of the study indicated that pre-service middle school mathematics teachers reflected different critical thinking skills and made use of different statistical and probabilistic knowledge in different contexts. They mostly reflected interpretation skill on the basis of their statistical and probabilistic knowledge. Moreover, to what extent they made use of critical thinking skills was differentiated on the basis of their statistical and probabilistic knowledge. They reflected complicated critical thinking process dealing with conditional probability statements. They had difficulty with probabilistic statements underlying conditional probability especially in this process.

The aim of the study is to investigate pre-service middle school mathematics teachers&rsquo / critical thinking processes through statistical and probabilistic knowledge in the context of popular media texts. The study was conducted with a qualitative case study method. Participants of the study consisted of four senior pre-service middle school mathematics teachers enrolled in a public university. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with the participants. Analysis of the data was conducted on the basis of two dimentions / critical thinking skills, and statistical and probabilistic knowledge. The results of the study indicated that pre-service middle school mathematics teachers reflected different critical thinking skills and made use of different statistical and probabilistic knowledge in different contexts. They mostly reflected interpretation skill on the basis of their statistical and probabilistic knowledge. Moreover, to what extent they made use of critical thinking skills was differentiated on the basis of their statistical and probabilistic knowledge. They reflected complicated critical thinking process dealing with conditional probability statements. They had difficulty with probabilistic statements underlying conditional probability especially in this process.

While the challenge of improving young North Americans’ civic engagement seems to lie in the hands of schools, studying alternative ways of teaching citizenship education could benefit the current educational system. In this context, free schools (i.e., schools run democratically by students and teachers), guided by a philosophy that aims at engaging students civically through the democratic activities that they support, offer a relatively unexplored ground for research. The present inquiry is a case study using tools of ethnography and drawing upon some principles of complexity thinking. It aims at understanding students’ citizenship education experiences during democratic activities in a Canadian free school. It describes many experiences that can arise from these activities. They occurred within a school that operated democratically based on a consensus-model. More precisely, they took place during two kinds of democratic activities: class meetings, which regulated the social life of the school, and judicial committees, whose function was to solve conflicts at the school. During these activities, students mostly experienced a combination of feelings of appreciation, concernment and empowerment. While experiencing these feelings, they predominantly engaged in decision-making and conflict resolution processes. During these processes, students modified their conflict resolutions skills, various conceptions, and their participation in democratic activities and in the school. Based on these findings, the study concludes that students can develop certain skills and attitude associated to citizenship education during these activities and become active from a citizenship perspective. Hence, these democratic activities represent alternative strategies that can assist educators in teaching about citizenship.

The impact of Internet technology on critical thinking is of growing interest among researchers. However, there still remains much to explore in terms of how critical thinking can be fostered through online environments for higher education. Ten years ago, Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) published an article describing the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework which provided an outline of three core elements that were able to describe and measure a collaborative and positive educational experience in an online learning environment, namely teaching presence (design, facilitation, and direct instruction), social presence (the ability of learners to project themselves socially and emotionally), and cognitive presence (the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse). This dissertation extends the body of research surrounding the CoI framework and also the literature on developing critical thinking in online environments by examining and exploring the extent to which teaching and social presence contribute to cognitive presence. The researcher was able to do this by offering 189 learners enrolled in 10 research methods courses and educational research courses an opportunity to use an innovative online resource (Research Design Learning Resource – RDLR) to assist them in learning about educational research and developing research proposals. By exploring how participants used this resource the researcher was able to gain insight into what factors contributed to a successful online learning experience and fostered cognitive presence. Quantitative and qualitative research approaches (mixed methods) were used in this study. The quantitative results indicated that both social and teaching presence had a strong positive relationship with cognitive presence and that learners generally perceived to have a positive learning experience using the RDLR. The qualitative findings helped elaborate the significant quantitative results and were organised into the following themes: making connections, multiple perspectives, resource design, being a self-directed learner, learning strategies, learning preferences, and barriers to cognitive presence. Future directions for critical thinking in online environments are discussed.

In the United States nearly 1 million annual new and recurrent myocardial infarctions (MI) occur with 10% of patients hospitalized with MI having unrecognized ischemic symptoms. Inexperienced nurses are expected to accurately interpret cardiac symptom cues, possibly without ever having experienced care of patients with MI, yet have been shown to be less able to classify symptom cues and reach accurate conclusions than experienced nurses. The purpose of this study was to test an educational intervention using theories of pattern recognition to develop CT in MI and improve nursing students’ clinical decision-making and clinical judgment using high fidelity patient simulation. This study used a quasi-experimental three group pre-/post-test design and qualitative data to triangulate information on critical thinking, clinical decision-making, and clinical judgment in MI. A sample of junior baccalaureate in nursing students (N = 54) from a large metropolitan university were divided in pairs and randomized to one of two control groups. Data were collected with instruments which measured pattern recognition in MI, critical thinking in MI, and self-perception of clinical decision-making. In addition, diagnostic efficiency and accuracy were measured. Triangulation on clinical decision making with semi-structured interviews using ‘thinking aloud’ technique was conducted. Data were analyzed as qualitative data and compared among groups. Students who were given prototypes for MI using simulation significantly improved critical thinking as measured by pattern recognition in MI (t(3.153(2), p = .038) compared with the non-simulation control group. Qualitative findings showed that students receiving the experimental simulation with a non-MI scenario and feedback-based debriefing had greatest gains in clinical reasoning which included development of clinical decision-making using analytic hypothetico-deductive and Bayesian reasoning processes and learned avoidance of heuristics. Students receiving the experimental simulation learned to identify salient symptom cues, analyzed data more complexly, and reflected on their simulation experience in a way which students reported improved learning. Students who were given MI only simulation scenarios developed deleterious heuristics and showed fewer gains in clinical reasoning, though both simulation groups demonstrated greater critical thinking ability than the non-simulation control group. Findings support the use of simulation to improve clinical reasoning including pattern recognition and clinical decision-making, and emphasize the significance of simulation scenario construction and debriefing to achieving learning outcomes. The findings could be used to guide further research to improve critical thinking, clinical decision-making, and clinical judgment in nursing students using simulation. Funding for this study was provided by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses and Philips Medical Systems and a testing grant from Elsevier, Assessment.

In the 21st century employers put a higher value than ever before on the interpersonal and thinking competencies of employees such as skills of teamwork, problem solving, and communi-cation, and the capability of creativity as the most important abilities (A. Herrington & J. Her-rington, 2006; Ramsden, 2003). Based on some of these learning theories, J. Herrington and Oliver (2000) further developed an authentic learning framework (p. 30). In this study, I re-ferred to their framework to build a rationale for my research design. The elements of critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration, expressed in this authentic learning framework, are the core concepts in my study.<p> My past teaching experiences in China sparked my interest in the study because I wit-nessed an inconsistency between teaching practices in higher education and the needs of students in schools and workplaces. Further, my learning experiences in Canada as a full-time student deepened my research interest. Thus, I devised the purpose of my study to probe the perceptions of professors in the University of Saskatchewan about their philosophies and practices with re-spect to their undergraduate teaching. I wanted to examine the perceptions of their teaching re-garding the authentic learning process in terms of critical thinking, problem solving, and collabo-ration. My study was a qualitative case study and I used semi-structured interviews to collect the data from six participants with diverse backgrounds from three different disciplines.<p> I organized the findings of the data in the following categories: Understanding of Authentic Learning (which provides the introduction to understanding the authentic learning process); themes of Context, Diversity of Perspectives, and Relationship; and the special theme of Dinas Belief Construction. There were similarities and variations emerging from the data. The varied backgrounds of participants such as their discipline, class size, teaching level, and administrative position appeared to exert influence on the participants perceptions of their teaching. Most of the differences occurred within themes of context and relationship. Apart from the pre-existent features, personal belief was another factor that might be seen to have led to some different perceptions.<p> The data findings provided a foundation to address the level of consistency between the findings and the literature. The discrepancy between my research findings and literature primarily consisted of the conflicting perceptions of teaching practices in relation to collaboration and problem solving. Collaboration was an important area in the literature but the participants per-ceptions of their teaching practices concerning collaboration varied. The adoption of technology in the teaching of my participants (e.g., the use of the Internet and video) was an unexpected finding in my study. Most participants described that the blending of technology in their teaching practices reinforced the cultivation of critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration.<p> Some implications rendered from the discussions are noteworthy for future research. In the belief construction, Dina (2007) described how implicit and explicit beliefs steered students thinking, transformed their behaviors, and eventually enhanced students abilities in critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration. From the constructivist perspective, Dina and Mary (2007) viewed learning as a process of constructing the understanding of diverse contexts in a community. Some teaching practices described by the participants were the special features of a particular discipline. Technology was a new focus in much of the literature of the past 10 years, which was closely linked with real life and collaboration nowadays. In addition, I found that each component of authentic learning (i.e., critical thinking, problem solving, and collabora-tion) deserved further exploration in the future. Although some deficiencies existed, I learned how to design a qualitative case study and these research experiences will become valuable ref-erences for my future research.

Abstract The great advancement in biotechnology makes huge influence on our modern life; how to improve the ability of our future citizens to accommodate the upcoming technology is one of the key issues in science education today. This study developed a set of experimental teaching modules ¡V The great future of the biotechnology ¡V for the junior high students for this purpose. There were two parts of this experimental teaching module: the first one was a hands-on learning course, in this activity students operated the basic biotechnological instruments and derive their own hypothesis. Another was a role-playing public hearing, debating about ¡§We should prohibit the importation of genetic modified food¡¨. Twenty-five eighth grade gifted students in the Kaohsiung municipal Kuo-chang junior middle high school were chosen as the sample to participate this research. Based on the questionnaires and the learning portfolios of the students, we found that students highly affirm this kind of learning. They reflect that the activities have helped them to gain the scientific knowledge, scientific learning process and skills, and the positive scientific attitude. The ability of the oral presentation, communication, judgments, problem-finding and evaluation ability have been enhanced through this learning process. The teaching module is also good for developing the strategy of corporation team work, considerate, and democratic. Activities like this teaching module are highly recommended to incorporate into the regular curriculum.