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Degree programs in Information Systems typically include a course on Systems Analysis and Design which is challenging to teach for instructors and challenging to grasp for learners. The central issue is that conditional knowledge, or when to use concepts and techniques in this domain, is seldom, if ever, taught. This chapter explains the ongoing evolution of a course on Systems Analysis and Design with the goal of developing conditional knowledge in students. It follows the process of changing course objectives, developing expert models of problem solving, experiencing challenges in delivering this kind of content, and reflecting on new insights that will improve course design in the future.

The landscape of learning and teaching is changing through the recognition of a diversity of learning types, new student generations as well as advances in technology and theory in education. While claims for interdisciplinary research and inquiry-based approaches, as well as integration of new media and technologies are at the heart of current discourses on teaching and learning, most educational activities still take place in a conservative format of the hierarchical teacher–student relationship in rather traditional educational facilities. As an architect and anthropologist, but most of all, as an academic who is devoted to teaching and research, I believe in teaching and learning experiences that are based on theoretical and methodological explorations in different disciplines in order to develop practical, research and critical thinking skills among the students. Students are motivated and engaged when they understand why information is important for them. Through an inquiry-based approach, abstract information becomes tangible and contextualized. In this chapter, I will first discuss common characteristics of our learners, today’s generation of students (the Millennials). Second, I will conceptually locate my approach to teaching among inquiry-based approaches such as Situated Learning, Learner-centered Teaching and Universal Design for Learning, which I see as complementary to each other. Third, I will explain my course design and give an account of two courses as examples for Inquiry-based Learning in action. Although these courses address architecture students, the Inquiry-based Learning and teaching experiences from these courses will inform a larger, more general audience interested in the subject matter.

The interactive video-case methodology of Literacy Education: Application and Practice (LEAP), a program that focuses on the reading/writing workshop approach, provided a shared environment for dialogue and self-reflection in an English/language arts teacher education program. LEAP includes a laserdisc, computer software, and seminal books on the reading and writing workshop approach, and is designed according to assumptions underlying cognitive flexibility theory. Twenty-three video mini-cases focus on classroom practices of three middle school teachers. This chapter describes the process of designing, developing and evaluating LEAP and offers guidelines based on what was learned about the process.

Many instructors have implemented decision-based learning (DBL) into their courses. This chapter is a careful qualitative analysis of the narratives in this book done by the editors. The author found common themes among all the narratives. The first theme was that many instructors discovered that they were missing conditional knowledge in their instruction. Second, the author found common issues around the complexity of designing an expert decision model (EDM). Included in this theme are stories about selecting problems and organizing the EDM, building the EDM around specific course learning outcomes, providing just-enough, just-in-time instruction, and introducing the decision model and software to students. Instructors also discovered that assessing the learning of students needed to go beyond traditional goals and began to include new goals related to conditional knowledge. Finally, the author describes the comments made by both faculty and students about the experience of using DBL. Several authors described the value of using DBL in the process of taking students from novice thinkers to expert thinkers. Many students expressed that they enjoyed the process that DBL presented to them and that they had a new level of confidence to be able to approach problems in the content area. Summaries and quotes from the chapters in this book are referenced by the authors’ names and the content areas they were teaching.

Writing is an act of expressive communication achieved through the medium of print. It is but one of three modes of linguistic communication. The other expressive mode is speaking, while listening and reading comprise the two receptive modes. The purpose of this chapter is to present the impact of a study in which students read and discussed expository poetry. Then they exchanged ideas relating to scientific concepts in the poems with students in a different group via pen pal letters. We analyzed these pen pal letters over four weeks to determine the influence of writing opportunities in an atmosphere rich in all four aspects of linguistic communication, involving authentic communication between students and within a community of learners.

Six of Brod Bagert’s unpublished poems concerned with science concepts were read by students in Collaborative Discover Groups (CDG) in two third-grade classes. After the groups discussed the poems, a mini-lesson on one of the Six Traits of Writing followed, and the students responded individually to a teacher-generated prompt related to the specific poem. The responses were in the form of pen pal letters to students in another class who had just read the same poem, received the same teacher-directed mini-lesson, and had had a similar discussion in their respective CDG. The data gleaned from these letters provide information demonstrating the effect of emphasizing all linguistic facets synergistically in a social, communicative setting. Both the processes and the findings will be discussed.

Analysis of the pen pal letters third-grade students wrote over four weeks showed the following patterns. (1) There was an increase in the discursive nature of the writing. (2) The incidence of rhetorical questioning, using A + B = C reasoning, and evaluative thinking was present in the fifth set of letters, and not in the first. Additionally, the number of sentences per letter increased from the first to the fifth, and the number of words per letter increased from approximately 50 words per letter to 75 words per letter. It appears that the linguistically synergistic communicative processes employed in this study are reflected in the increased sophistication and communicative nature of these writings.

The data revealed the importance of including the sociocultural tenants in the classroom, emphasizing that reading, writing, speaking, and listening are all a part of the same phenomenon. Together they strengthen and support each other.

This study examines the scheduling problem for a two-stage flowshop. All jobs are immediately available for processing and job characteristics including the processing times and due dates are known and certain. The goals of the scheduling problem are (1) to minimize the total flowtime for all jobs, (2) to minimize the total number of tardy jobs, and (3) to minimize both the total flowtime and the total number of tardy jobs simultaneously. Lower bound performances with respect to the total flowtime and the total number of tardy jobs are presented. Subsequently, this study identifies the special structure of schedules with minimum flowtime and minimum number of tardy jobs and develops three sets of heuristics which generate a Pareto set of bicriteria schedules. For each heuristic procedure, there are four options available for schedule generation. In addition, we provide enhancements to a variety of lower bounds with respect to flowtime and number of tardy jobs in a flowshop environment. Proofs and discussions to lower bound results are also included.

The quest to explain how incumbents respond to changes in their industry is affirming the role that managerial cognition plays in those decisions. Recent empirical evidence suggests that anticipating the nature and timing of industry changes could increase the likelihood that the organization develops an effective response. Mounting evidence suggests also that such ability to anticipate and respond may depend on decision-makers’ prevailing and emerging cognitive frames. This raises a number of questions about the nature of those cognitive frames and how they impact the decision making processes and ultimately organizational response. In this paper we report the findings from three case studies of how established incumbents respond to changes to their industries brought about by the emergence of the Internet.