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The present study investigated the effect of online collaborative project-based learning on the language performance and attitudes of intermediate level students at the College of Applied Sciences in Oman. The study is a quasi-experimental study and the sample consisted of four classes (93 students in total) in Nizwa College of Applied Sciences. These participants were in their foundation year and were taking the Academic English Course during the time of the research experiment. Two classes were assigned to the experimental group (46 students) and they were directed to collaborate online in doing their research projects. The other two classes were assigned to the control group (47 students) and did their projects individually. A language test containing reading and writing questions, an attitude questionnaire, students' project scores and transcripts of focused group discussions were used to collect the data needed to answer the research questions. The study revealed that the main positive effect of online collaborative project-based learning was clear on students' writing skill in the post test (i.e. students in the experimental group outperformed students in the control group).

The paper explored the benefits as well as the concerns of vocabulary learning with clay modeling in terms of practical and pedagogical implications for creating positive learning experiences.

A mixed-methods design was conducted to examine the effectiveness of vocabulary learning with clay modeling practices in lower socioeconomic status schools.

Although test results showed no statistically significant differences between the groups, the clay modeling group did improve vocabulary acquisition similar to the sentence writing group. The students were actively engaged with hands-on activities using the clay and also demonstrated positive emotional, behavioral and physical experiences.

The addition of the clay modeling provided an opportunity for kinesthetic learning but created a high extraneous cognitive load with the challenges incurred through the use of clay.

The challenges can be reduced by 1) adopting appropriate instructional strategies to design and implement effective clay modeling activities for students and teachers, 2) providing training or professional workshop development for teachers and 3) ongoing practical support and assistance for students.

Exploring the use of kinesthetic instructional practice at the high school level may prove beneficial since clay modeling is frequently used effectively at lower grade levels.

The current study explores the added value of clay modeling for high school students’ biology vocabulary learning in a lower socioeconomic status school from practical and pedagogical perspectives.

This study aims to examine the way in which elderly people, men and women, with a terminal illness use language to construct a narrative about their “living-with-dying” experience.

This investigation is a secondary analysis based on a corpus of health and illness narratives collected by the Health Experiences Research Group at the University of Oxford and published by the DIPEx charity (available at: http://healthtalk.org/home).

This study shows that there are qualitative differences in the way in which not only elderly people but also men and women report their experience with terminal illness and their relation to death.

Understanding the different perspectives from which elderly people narrate their experiences of how they live while dying from terminal illness can help health professionals to develop more effective all-inclusive health policies and practices in end-of-life care.

Audit and feedback (A&F) often underlie implementation projects, described as a circular process; i.e. an A&F cycle. They are widely used, but effect varies with no apparent explanation. We need to understand how A&F work in real-life situations. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to describe and explore mental healthcare full A&F cycle experiences.

This is a naturalistic qualitative study that uses four focus groups and qualitative content analysis.

Staff accepted the initial A&F stages, perceiving it to enhance awareness and reassure them about good practice. They were willing to participate in the full cycle and implement changes, but experienced poor follow-up and prioritization, not giving them a chance to own to the process. An important finding is the need for an A&F cycle facilitator.

Research teams cannot be expected to be involved in implementing clinical care. Guidelines will keep being produced to improve service quality and will be expected to be practiced. This study gives insights into planning and tailoring A&F cycles.

Tools to ease implementation are not enough, and the key seems to lie with facilitating a process using A&F. This study underscores leadership, designated responsibility and facilitation throughout a full audit cycle.

Very little work has been published on teaching for social justice in the Middle East. This paper demonstrates how a group of Arab women’s reading and writing of their world was facilitated by using a social justice pedagogy based on Gutstein’s (2006) model. The study involved 20 Middle Eastern women (ages ranging from 16-36). The findings suggest that the students have developed significant abilities to use mathematics as a tool to read and write their world. In addition, the findings show that, like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, these young women are also interested in social justice issues. This is particularly significant because of current ongoing social developments in the Middle East.

Peer feedback is applauded in many writing courses for fostering students’ independence and collaboration and for creating a wider learning environment in which students can benefit from the feedback and diversity of input they get from other peers (Stubbe, 2013). It improves students’ writing skills by developing their use of effective composing processes since they can share ideas while planning, drafting, and revising writing forms (Richards and Schmidt, 2010). It also reduces the anxiety of students who can get constructive feedback on their writing from other peers instead of their teachers (Phillipson, 2007). However, application of peer feedback in writing courses is a complex process since it requires provision of rubrics and guidelines for students to follow; this is in addition to explaining the areas they need to focus on. It also requires having cultural awareness of the level of corrections Arab students can accept. This paper reflects on a practical experiment conducted with a group of undergraduate students for showing how peer feedback is approached and practised by students in English language courses. Students’ views and perceptions about peer feedback are also surveyed showing their appreciation of the level of collaboration peer feedback encourages among them. Nevertheless, the results also show a number of concerns students have about peer feedback.

The purpose of this study is to examine the uptake of peer vs. instructor feedback provided on written essays by undergraduates in a writing course at a public university in Saudi Arabia.

This was a classroom intervention exploratory study with 16 pairs of students attending a writing class over a period of 14 weeks.

Analysis of feedback and uptake indicated that the students incorporated a high rate (85.21%) of feedback in revising their essays. The results also showed that the quantity of students’ uptake of instructor feedback (88.77%) was higher than that of peer feedback (82.17%). In terms of the rate of uptake of global feedback focusing on content and organization vs. local feedback focusing on language and formatting, the rate of uptake of local feedback (85.34%) was slightly higher than the uptake of global feedback (84.90%). The current results also showed that the quality of feedback (peer vs. instructor feedback and global vs. local feedback) also varied. Students’ perspectives on feedback underlined their perceived value of feedback on writing, their preference for instructor feedback and the perceived benefits of providing and receiving feedback.

This study investigated an area that has been under-researched in the Saudi higher education context and it has direct implications for the provision of feedback in writing classes.

The main objective of the present study is to explore whether there are variations in the employment of evaluative language resources by male and female writers. More specifically, the study focuses on variations, if any, that can be attributed to difference in gender.

The study compared and contrasted forty recommendation letters written by male academics to the same number of letters written by female recommenders. The study uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches.

The investigation of three attitudinal resources in letters of recommendations showed that the most employed resource was the judgment sub-system. The appreciation domain was in the second position, and the least frequent was the affect. The results also revealed no statistically significant variations in attitude sub-systems: Affect and appreciation as the writers in both groups (males and females) employed almost the same options in each. In respect with judgment, however, the analysis explored significant differences between the two sets as male academics used more judgment resources than females.

The main contributions of this study may be as follows: first, it is one of very few studies drawing on the attitude-category of appraisal system, as an analytical tool to examine gender differences in recommendation letters very particularly on the ones written by non-native speakers of English. Second, the gender factor is central in the genre of the recommendation letters and hence researchers should be cognizant of its role as certain variations might be impacted by it. Third, the lists of tokens can be offered as heuristics for academics to have most common words or phrases to use in their letters. Finally, the findings can hopefully bear some important pedagogical implications, very specifically for novice and non-native academic writers of recommendations letters.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a novel storytelling approach that investigates lived experience at the intersection of motherhood/caregiving and Ph.D. pursuits. The paper contributes to the feminist tradition of writing differently through the process of care that emerges from shared stories.

Using a process called heartful-communal storytelling, the authors evoke personal and embodied stories and transgressive narratives. The authors present a composite process drawing on heartful-autoethnography, dialogic writing and communal storytelling.

The paper makes two key contributions: (1) the paper illustrates a novel feminist process in action and (2) the paper contributes six discrete stories of lived experience at the intersection of parenthood and Ph.D. studies. The paper also contributes to the development of the feminist tradition of writing differently. Three themes emerged through the storytelling experience, and these include (1) creating boundaries and transgressing boundaries, (2) giving and receiving care and (3) neoliberal conformity and resistance. These themes, like the stories, also became entangled.

The paper demonstrates how heartful-communal storytelling can lead to individual and collective meaning making. While the Ph.D. is a solitary path, the authors' heartful-communal storytelling experience teaches that holding it separate from other relationships can impoverish what is learnt and constrain the production of good knowledge; the epistemic properties of care became self-evident.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an online faculty development pilot course on how to engage students online. A framework was used, referred to as the Trifecta of Student Engagement, for the design of the course. The Trifecta of Student Engagement proposes that students, in order to be fully engaged in a course, need to be engaged with their course content, with their peers and with their instructor. The course has three units of content that each correspond to the Trifecta of Student Engagement. This course has gone through one pilot with faculty and has impacted students and faculty positively.

An online faculty development course was piloted with eight faculty members across a range of disciplines who participated in the program. After taking the course, they had to apply the Trifecta of Student Engagement framework to a course they taught and share what they did via written report, webinar, or web presentation. This study summarized the faculty participants’ written reports and presentations as well as provided a qualitative evaluation on the impact this course had on students and faculty.

After faculty applied the Trifecta of Student Engagement framework to courses taught, faculty saw an improvement in student engagement, satisfaction, learning and achievement. Three faculty surveyed students to determine their engagement and satisfaction and found students to respond positively to the use of tools and activities for student-to-content engagement, student-to-student engagement and student-to-instructor engagement. Two faculty examined student grades to determine if there were changes in student outcomes. One professor saw average grades increase by 11 percent. Another professor saw grades improve by 8 percent. She also found that student assessment of learning increased by 0.57. Both faculty attributed the improvement to the effectiveness of the teaching strategies employed.

This research is limited to the eight faculty who participated in the pilot. Some faculty used methods to attempt to measure the impacts of their teaching practices by surveying students and looking at student performance data. A second pilot is needed for additional faculty to take the course and apply the Trifecta of Engagement framework to generate more data for impact.

Institutions looking to create an online teaching professional development course for faculty can utilize the Trifecta of Student Engagement framework for their course design. Additionally, faculty can read about tools and strategies that they can immediately apply to create more student-to-content engagement, student-to-student engagement and student-to-instructor engagement.

Faculty can be more intentional in how they engage students in their online course experience.

This paper adds to the literature on faculty development regarding student-centered teaching practices. Other institutions looking to create a faculty development course or program that utilizes a student-centered framework may find aspects of this paper useful for their own online teaching professional development initiatives.