Can a class assignment covering the reading help students do better in an introductory chemistry class for nonmajors? Two sections of the same course have been compared where one section had a reading assignment that "forced" the students to interact with the text while the other class had the typical homework, quiz assignments, and…

This paper describes a reading assignment that resulted in students completing 80-90% of the assigned reading in a content-heavy science course taught in a flipped format. Students reported almost unanimously that the assignment was valuable in helping them learn the material, and a majority reported that other professors should adopt a similar…

The flipped classroom has the potential to improve student performance. Because flipping involves both preclass preparation and problem solving in the classroom, the means by which increased learning occurs and whether the method of delivering content matters is of interest. In a partially flipped cell biology course, students were assigned online…

We explored the effectiveness of a flipped active learning pedagogy in a liberal arts mathematics course without video or interactive preparation. In both control and active learning classes, students were required to respond to a reading before class and take a quiz after class. During the active learning class, students worked together in groups…

The Xreading website provides students with access to an extensive virtual library of graded readers. Teachers can then use it to keep track of which titles the students access, the total number of words they read, their reading speed, and also whether they have completed post-reading quizzes. However, an overreliance on monitoring student…

Hoping to increase student engagement, the author decided to re-envision his course on contemporary global issues in a "flipped" format. The results proved encouraging--to a degree. Over the course of five semesters, applying lessons gleaned from the literature, students learned how to read challenging texts outside of class and…

The author presents self-report data from students in three upper-level undergraduate courses to illustrate the comparative effectiveness of different out-of-class assessment approaches in promoting completion and comprehension of reading assignments. Students reported agreeing or strongly agreeing that all three assignments motivated them to…

This is an exploratory study about engaging students in mathematics learning both inside and outside of the classroom of an introductory proof course. The author utilized the framework of scholarship of teaching and learning as a guide to ensure the research process was carried out systematically. This study was conducted through one cycle of…

Flipped classrooms and inquiry-based learning (IBL) have each become popular in their own right, leading to a natural question: Why not combine these two great ideas? Although flipping a class usually involves students reading or watching videos before class, and IBL focuses on allowing and encouraging students to develop material on their own,…

Social presence (represented by salience of instructor and fellow students) in an online teaching environment has been shown to influence perceptions of course activity and self-estimates of learning. An experiment is described here in which teacher presence is manipulated via personalized messages from the teaching assistant throughout the…

This paper discusses my experiences taking a semester's worth of undergraduate courses in order to determine the literacy task demands placed on students in the classroom. It has been well documented that students struggle with literacy tasks when they enter college. My experiences indicated that part of this struggle might be because reading…

Real Analysis is a required class for most undergraduate mathematics majors, but it is also one of the most difficult classes they will take. In this article, the author compares two approaches to teaching in the two analysis classes she has taught. The first one was taught in a traditional lecture-homework-exam format, while the second was taught…

Different approaches to creating out-of-class reading assignments for university general education courses might affect the amount of time students actually spend reading. Five instructors of a required religion/philosophy class used different approaches to assign out-of-class reading. Subsequently, their students (n = 504) were surveyed about…

At the college level, the effectiveness of active-learning interventions is typically measured at the broadest scales: the achievement or retention of all students in a course. Coarse-grained measures like these cannot inform instructors about an intervention's relative effectiveness for the different student populations in their classrooms or…

College science teachers know that students get the most out of class if they have completed the assigned reading. To reinforce this expectation, we ask our introductory physics students to submit a question they had about the reading. In this paper we describe the rationale and logistics of this assignment. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)