Motivating students to endure teacher education and enter teaching is a pressing challenge in many countries. We address this challenge by exploring the concept of "situational interest" (SI) in teacher education and students' interest in teaching. Survey data was collected from Norwegian student teachers (N = 347) using a…

Recently, the number of online courses provided for university students around the world has increased substantially. Instruction is delivered most commonly through either asynchronous video lectures (pre-recorded videos with no real-time communication) or synchronous video lectures (live-streamed videos with real-time communication). From a…

A new perspective on chemistry learning could be the optimal learning moment of view based on flow theory. Optimal learning moments (OLMs) that occur when students experience high levels of interest, challenge, and skill at the same time were investigated in this study. Participants of the study were 47 pre-service science teachers. Data were…

Retention of students' attention in general chemistry courses stands as one of the main challenges that educators are facing in classes of any size and is especially prevalent with classes composed of mixed majors. Herein, we describe our experience with introducing short, 10 min student lectures ("flash talks") on popular chemistry…

As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, most courses at a large technical university were adapted so that students had a free choice of whether to attend lectures on-site or online; in addition, in many courses, lecture recordings were available. At the subsequent exam session, over 17,000 student-survey responses were collected regarding…

Considerable research has examined the prevalence and apparent consequences of task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) in both laboratory and authentic educational settings. Few studies, however, have explored methods to reduce TUTs during learning; those few studies tested small samples or used unvalidated TUT assessments. The present experimental study…

Flipped classroom in pharmacy education has been widely explored with a major focus on its effectiveness but little emphasis is given to assess the different in-class activities. Therefore, this work compares two in-class activities in an overall flipped classroom: analogical learning and team-based learning (TBL) for a pharmacy course. The…

Background: Previous studies have investigated effects of out-of-school STEM activities aimed at stimulating children's interest in science with positive results. However, research has not discussed the reasons why such activities are successful. Purpose: In this study, we address this gap by investigating which factors children themselves…

At large institutions of higher education, students frequently have a choice whether to attend the introductory physics sequence asynchronously online, on-site in a traditional lecture setting, or in a reformed studio setting. In this study, we investigate how these different settings are correlated with measures of self-efficacy, interest in…

This article proposes a study design developed to disentangle the objective characteristics of a learning situation from individuals' subjective perceptions of that situation. The term objective characteristics refers to the agreement across students, whereas subjective perceptions refers to inter-individual heterogeneity. We describe a novel…

Science dissemination or popularization of science refers to the act of facilitating the understanding of research and works of scientific and/or technological origin among the general public. Science dissemination is a relevant issue in the realm of public policy. Considering that in Brazil, the university is responsible for most of the…

This study describes an intervention that introduced a period of solving non-routine problems into tertiary STEM lectures. The aim was twofold: to attempt to increase student engagement and to introduce them to the kind of domain-free abstract reasoning that involves critical, creative and innovative thinking. The study involved over 600 STEM…

This paper examines the relationships between student interest, self-efficacy, and perceptions of the instructor on a set of learning outcomes that include, but are broader than, traditional measures of student learning. Consistent with the focus of positive psychology, the study focuses not only on knowledge gains but also on the flow experience…

Past MOOC research has tended to focus on learning outcomes valued in traditional higher education settings, such as achievement and retention. This study recognises that student ratings are an important alternative outcome measure in MOOCs. This paper adopted a semiautomatic text mining approach to collect and analyse 8475 ratings and reviews…

In this article we examine first-year student teachers' possibilities to become interested in professional issues in teacher education. We study the phenomenon of becoming interested among first-year student teachers via three different kinds of data. We analysed our data through John Dewey's definition of interest, where a person has an interest…