Even highly motivated undergraduates drift off their STEM career pathways. In large introductory STEM classes, instructors struggle to identify and support these students. To address these issues, we developed co-redesign methods in partnership with disciplinary experts to create high-structure STEM courses that better support students and produce…

The effectiveness of implementing various audience response system (ARS) formats in large classes to engage students, positively influence academic outcomes, and align with their preferences for different types of activities lacked sufficient information. This study aimed to (1) evaluate students' perspectives on different ARS formats, including…

The transformation of China's education reform from extensive to connotative development involved a shift from characteristically exogenous and late development to endogenous and spontaneous development. The mechanism behind the shift from rationalism to universalism has resulted in tension between extension and intension in the process of…

Inevitably having large-size classes creates a huge number of challenges but also benefits that motivate the higher education institutes to recruit large-size student bodies. This paper aims to identify the focus of scholars in this field, how the concerns have been addressed as well as a pedagogic basis for large-class management and delivery,…

In distance education courses with a large number of students and groups, the organization and facilitation of collaborative writing tasks are challenging. Teachers need support for planning, specification, execution, monitoring, and evaluation of collaborative writing tasks in their course. This requires a collaborative learning platform for…

Many instructional methods that focus on analytical, skill, and competency development have a single or small set of appropriate answers. Best-answer assignments are popular for largeenrollment classes because of the relative ease with which scoring and feedback can be managed at scale. However, cheating is regularly confirmed at disturbingly high…

Large-class university lectures remain commonplace, yet their educational value is contested. While the majority of criticism contrasts transmissive lectures with active learning pedagogies, this case study evaluates a lecture series on its intrinsic qualities, looking at staff and student understandings of the lecture's contribution to academic…

In a traditional lecturing environment, students possess limited agency in accepting or rejecting information provided by teachers. A higher level of student agency involves opportunities and actively identifying uncertainties and collaborating with peers to deepen understanding within the classroom community. Teachers play a crucial role in…

Kindergartners' math skills predict later academic outcomes. However, we know little about kindergarten mathematics instruction. Using data from 182 classroom observations in a large urban district, we explore time spent on mathematics and math content coverage. We also examine two underinvestigated aspects of kindergarten math instruction: (1)…

This study used systematic observation to test the direct and moderating effects of class size on children's momentary behavioural engagement in learning. Data were collected with 632 children (50.6% girls) in 121 classrooms in 92 schools recruited into the Children's School Lives national cohort study of Irish primary schooling. The Observational…

Student-generated questions are an important mechanism for learning and self-regulation, yet their scarcity in classroom discourse points to a need to understand how students decide to ask or withhold their questions. This study examined how 12 graduate students in an introductory statistics course made decisions about asking questions during…

Undergraduate general chemistry courses are often perceived in a negative light by students. Student attitudes towards chemistry play a significant role in their success in chemistry and retention in STEM altogether. Research has shown in K-12 classrooms that care-based instruction strategies can help to improve student attitudes towards…

Many large introductory classes are taught in stadium-style classrooms, which makes group work more difficult due to the room layout and immobile seating. These classrooms may create challenges for an instructor who wants to monitor student engagement because the layouts make it difficult to interact with the students as they work. Student…

This study explores the relationship between the self-confidence and content knowledge of undergraduate students in a large enrollment geoscience course following an active-learning think-pair-share (TPS) activity, and whether high confidence necessarily leads to overconfidence. We used a pre-experimental, one group pre-test -- post-test design,…

Author Wiley Blevins is renowned for changing the way educators think about teaching children to read, helping thousands of teachers implement effective phonics instruction. Now, Blevins gets us to think in powerful new ways about differentiating whole-class phonics lessons, so students at every skill level can engage. With Blevins' trademark…