Contribution: This article describes how a peer learning strategy called student-led tutorials (SLTs) can improve student performance in an electromagnetism course (EM). This study provides empirical evidence on how promoting student active participation in collaborative problem-solving activities improves performance rates. Background: In 2019,…

Community-oriented education has witnessed an increasing interest in online service-learning opportunities. Digital Learning Companion is an online service-learning project supported by Taiwan's Ministry of Education to give students experiential learning opportunities and practice social responsibility. As part of the initiative, 189 local and…

Background and Context: Recursion in binary trees has proven to be a hard topic. There was not much research on enhancing student understanding of this topic. Objective: We present a tutorial to enhance learning through practice of recursive operations in binary trees, as it is typically taught post-CS2. Method: We identified the misconceptions…

Learning quantum mechanics is challenging, even for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Research-validated interactive tutorials that build on students' prior knowledge can be useful tools to enhance student learning. We have been investigating student difficulties with quantum mechanics pertaining to the double-slit experiment in…

Pressure to increase the throughput of university students in ethical ways has been a catalyst for innovations to improve learning and student success. Student dropout occurs mostly in the first year of study and poor performance is a major contributor to dropout even if the underlying reason for the poor performance is not academic…

Online plagiarism tutorials are increasingly popular in higher education, as faculty and staff try to curb the plagiarism epidemic. Yet no research has validated the efficacy of such tools in minimizing plagiarism in the sciences. Our study compared three plagiarism-avoidance training regimens (i.e., no training, online tutorial, or homework…

According to Krashen's affective filter hypothesis, students who are highly motivated have their self-consciousness. When they enter a learning context with a low level of anxiety, they are much more likely to become successful language acquirers than those who do not. Affective factors such as motivation, attitude, and anxiety, have a direct…

We describe the difficulties advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with concepts related to addition of angular momentum in quantum mechanics. We also describe the development and implementation of a research-based learning tool, Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT), to reduce these difficulties. The preliminary evaluation…

The student cohort on the University Science Extended Degree (SED) course is diverse in terms of educational experience. One of the key facets of teaching at this level is to engage and prepare students for higher levels of education in the sciences. The purpose of this evaluation is to relate a specific virtual framework, designed for students…

A team of instructional designers, educators, and the School of Liberal Arts (SLA) academic program coordinator from a nonprofit online college, collaborated on producing short voice-over videos with interactive elements that address the most common technology frustrations of beginning students. These videos were inserted into the "Start…

The purposes of this study were, on one had, to determine the impact of a peer tutoring program on preventing academic failure and dropouts among first-year students (N = 100), from Civil Engineering, Economics, Pharmacy, and Chemical Engineering careers; while, on the other hand, to identify the potential benefits of such tutoring program on the…

Traditional teaching styles practiced at universities do not generally suit all students' learning styles. For a variety of reasons, students do not always engage in learning in the courses in which they are enrolled. New methods to create and deliver educational material are available, but these do not always improve learning outcomes.…

Fifteen application-oriented chemical tutorials were developed out of which thirteen are currently in use in the general chemistry lab rotary curriculum for chemistry students at Washington University from 1998 to 2000. The central philosophy of the tutorial that the students learn to combine information from variety of sources like science…

Graphing calculators have been used in the mathematics classroom for speed, to leap hurdles, to make connections among representations, and to permit realism through the use of authentic data. In this study, a graphing calculator tutorial provided on the Casio FX1.0 and FX2.0 PLUS models was found to serve a fifth purpose, improving manipulative…