To this day, Columbia College maintains one of the most robust liberal arts curriculaa mong the tertiary education landscape, an institutional decision that has been both lauded and denounced by students, professors, and cultural critics alike. As this dissertation examines, high tensions from all angles largely stem from the Core Curriculum’s dual commitment to two seemingly oppositional values: its original mission and its ongoing evolution. My interpretive study of this unique undergraduate program begins with an examination of the cultural tradition from which Core derives—the West—considering how the notion of the liberal arts has evolved from antiquity to present day by pinpointing artifacts that demonstrate each era’s practices and priorities. Atop this foundational context, whose relevance persists in its establishment of citizenship, reciprocity, self-determination, and amateurism as underlying values of the liberal arts, I then examine university archival records dating back to the Core’s inception in 1919 and engage with personal stories, collected through interviews with alumni and former instructors of the program. These retrospective and interpersonal examinations are further complemented by the weaving in of my own experiences from my time as a student in the program, adding an introspective angle. In service of determining what is, was, and should be at the core of this curricular phenomenon, I neither defend nor rebuke the Core’s existence, but rather wonder and imagine its universal potential, ending with a call for more finite iterations of the program’s long-lasting values.

The general purpose of this study is to determine the principal curricular requirements in the field of personnel management which now are prescribed by member institutions in the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business.

In this study, a comparative analysis was made of the marketing courses offered in thirty-two senior colleges of Texas including the marketing courses offered at North Texas State College. An analysis was also made to determine what courses in business administration are being offered in the senior colleges in Texas.

The purposes of this study are to evaluate the effectiveness of the training program at Arlington State College; to evaluate the curricula of the Semi-Professional Engineering Program at Arlington State College; and if needed, suggest improvements in the Semi-Professional Engineering curriculum at Arlington State College.

The problem of this study was to formulate a required physical education program for men in the North Texas State Teachers College, Denton, Texas.

This study examines the attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors of community college dance educators offering insights into community college dance programming more broadly. The purpose of this mixed methods sequential explanatory study is to identify and describe dance educators at community colleges by obtaining quantitative data from a survey of current teachers and then following up with purposefully selected individuals to explore those results more in-depth through qualitative portraiture. Conceptually, this study establishes a community college dance education research agenda and lays the groundwork for further research. This study establishes a knowledge base that extends beyond the immediate experiences of the teachers, with implications for the wider fields of community college and postsecondary dance education. The integrated quantitative and qualitative findings of this study yielded four key themes. First, community college dance educators maintain a multiplicity of roles inside and outside the institution. Second, while the participants of this study believe that both student dance performance opportunities and somatic practices provide transformative learning opportunities and contribute to student persistence, in consideration of their intrinsic educational value, the former are perceived as critical components of the dance curricula and the latter as ancillary. Third, though their styles may differ, community college dance educators believe they provide mentoring to their dance students that moves their roles beyond the delivery of technical dance training and content knowledge toward the teaching of transferable life skills. Lastly, community college dance educators employ individualized instruction and assessment strategies in their teaching as the circumstances of their classroom environments force teachers to hold multiple pedagogical priorities at once.

Promising results from the use of problem-based learning (PBL) as a teaching method in medical programs have encouraged many institutions to incorporate PBL into their curricula. This study investigates how applying hybrid-PBL (H-PBL) in a microbiology laboratory impacts students' higher-order thinking as compared to applying a lecture-based pedagogy. The experimental design compared the learning outcomes of two groups of students: the control group and the H-PBL group, for whom PBL cases comprised 30% of the curriculum. Both groups were taught basic skills for the microbiology lab by the same instructor. Using the traditional teaching style for the control group, the instructor offered each student what they needed for their experiments. The H-PBL group practiced experimental design, data analysis, theory proposal, and created research questions by using six study cases that were closely linked to the area of study. The outcome was measured using a pre- and post- assessment consisting of 24 questions that was designed by following Bloom's taxonomy of learning levels. A one-way ANOVA was used to analyze the data. The results showed that for the first three levels of Bloom's taxonomy— knowledge, comprehension, and application—there were no statistically significant differences between the H-PBL and control group gain scores as determined by a one-way ANOVA. For the knowledge level, f (1, 78) = .232, and p = .632; for the comprehension level, f (1, 78) = .004, and p = .951; and for the application level f (1, 78) =. 028, and p =.863. On the other hand, the gain scores for the three higher levels—analysis, evaluation, and creativity—improved for the H-PBL group. The analysis level showed statistically significant differences, with f (1, 78) = 4.012, and p = .049. Also, there were statistically significant differences in students' performance at the evaluation level, with f (1, 78) = 11.495, and p = .001, and the creativity level, with f (1,78 ) = 23.432, and p = .000. In conclusion, the study results supported the value of incorporating hybrid problem-based learning (H-PBL) into the traditional microbiology laboratory curriculum.

The unified learning model (ULM) focuses on students' engagement, motivation, prior knowledge, and working memory. This study employs the use of video games to assess students' learning through a 3D chemistry gaming environment. In this human-subjects research, students carried out missions and applied reasoning to solve problems appropriate for general chemistry content. For learning to occur, students must be engaged and motivated as stated in the ULM. Learning cannot necessarily be accomplished by experience alone, and critical thinking is required to turn the experience into learning. The interpretation of educational theory applied to video games and this proposed study are discussed. A moderately positive correlation was found between exam score and study time (playing the game). Essentially the more time spent playing the game or an online activity the higher the exam scores. There was an alpha level less than 0.05 (p < 0.05) between the experimental group and non-traditional group (no game or online activity). Supporting that there was a statistically significant difference between groups, the null hypothesis was accepted between the game and online activity. Furthermore, as stated under the ULM, engagement is necessary for optimal learning.

The purpose of this dissertation was to evaluate the Mandarin Chinese course taught as a foreign language for distance learners through a review of distance education and how it applied in foreign language teaching, a learning package based on Unisa's Mandarin Chinese 1, a beginners' course, was fully discussed and demonstrated. An analysis was made of what had been utilised in the learning package and how each element helped distance learners to develop their language skills. Based on the course's learning outcomes, learning material, assessments and learning support, empirical research was done through focus group interviews and questionnaires to test the effectiveness of the Mandarin course. Analysis of the results suggested that: • Students needed to build up a more realistic expectation about learning Chinese. • Students' workloads needed to be re-examined and re-measured. • Certain students lacked learner autonomy. • Mandarin courses should be produced jointly with distance teaching institutions abroad. / Educational Studies / M.Ed. (Didactics)

This study develops and applies a conceptual framework that can be used to evaluate dynamic Web platforms in order to determine a platform for teaching Web application development in tertiary institutions. The framework is specific, yet comprehensive and supported with theory and empirical experimental programming results. We first identify the concepts of Web application development and the constraints to be satisfied by a platform for teaching identified concepts. Then we establish various criteria that will enhance the teaching of the concepts. We also establish qualities and experiment that will ensure that a selected platform is easy to use, fast, portable and affordable. A spreadsheet tool is developed to apply the framework and enable users to customize the framework by varying the criteria's weights. The developed framework is tested by the evaluation of the suitability of Java Servlets, JSP, ASP and PHP with PHP emerging as a suitable platform. / Computing / M.Sc. (Information Systems)