This article illustrates the potential for hackathons to serve as an innovative educational tool in addressing the underrepresentation of minority communities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Using Merced, California--a region recognised for its agricultural economy, socioeconomic disparities, and diverse…

Few empirical studies have demonstrated the positive consequences of integrating design thinking with project-based learning (PBL) for generating meaningful community impact. Our study fills this void by incorporating a new pedagogical approach--design thinking--into project-based learning (PBL) as an innovative way of structuring class…

Providing college students with learning experiences that account for the interdisciplinary nature of most STEM professions has proven challenging. STEM educational practices typically follow a more scripted process designed to build important foundational skills. In contrast, most STEM professions are interdisciplinary and collaborative in…

The purpose of this report is to provide findings from the Abt Global independent evaluation of the PreK-12 STEM Pathway program. The Community Training and Assistance Center (CTAC), a nonprofit organization focused on supporting educational innovation and community change, received an Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Early Phase grant from…

A relatively new pedagogical approach termed "faith and learning in action" (FLA) involves crafting an assignment to include faith integration (FI) in a way that inspires the learned action of an academic subject through service-learning (SL). This study incorporated experiential learning methods in the employment of FLA into a…

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Computer Science and STEM-related fields were among the most resistant to online courses. This is because of a perception of the need for more hands-on instruction with labs, clinicals, field studies, etc. Additionally, many STEM students had perceptions based on limited experience of an online STEM course.…

Background: Overall, high rates of American high school seniors lack writing proficiency (75%) and historically underrepresented minority (URM) populations fare even worse (91% of African American, 89% of Latinx) (U.S. Dept of Education, 2011), which suggests that URM college students enter college with lower writing abilities (Bracco et al.,…

Colleges and universities across the United States are recognizing the public memory function of their campus spaces and facing difficult decisions about how to represent the ugly sides of their histories within their landscapes of remembrance. Official administrative responses to demands for greater inclusiveness are often slow and conservative…

Background: Project-based learning has shown promise in improving learning outcomes for diverse students. However, studies on its impacts have largely focused on the perceptions of students and instructors or students' immediate performance. This study reports the impact of taking a project-based introductory engineering course on students'…

The growth in the tech industry in recent years has increased business major students' interest in software programming and app development. However, the traditional way of teaching these courses involves intensive coding exercises and little interaction among students. These methods often discourage the students due to the slow learning curve and…

This case study explores how a problem-based learning (PBL), graduate education course could be organized in ways that utilize the current knowledge of how people learn within diverse, real world community settings. Students were asked to identify an educational enterprise and a social problem within a culturally diverse, high-need community.…

Engaging undergraduate students in community-based research (CBR) offers rich benefits to both students and communities (Strand, Marullo, Cutforth, Stoeker, & Donahue, 2006). Finding ways to expand its application promises to multiply those benefits. Senior capstone courses represent a promising vehicle for that expansion, as they are also…

Intercultural competence--the ability to successfully interact and communicate sensitively with members of other cultural groups--is an essential skill in multicultural societies and an increasingly globalized world. A quasi-experimental study revealed that completing a cross-cultural international psychology course increased college students'…

Educational approaches in structural engineering have focused on classical methods for solving problems with manual calculations through assignments, quizzes, and exams. The use of computational software to apply the learned knowledge has been ignored for decades. This paper describes an educational approach to tackle the lack of applicable…

A qualitative phenomenological study examining the learning activities that take place at a college radio station. The research objective is to understand the social practices that make possible or hinder the construction of learning experiences at KCSS, the campus radio station at California State University, Stanislaus. Document analysis,…