This paper explores how PurpleState, a political simulation designed to foster skills and knowledge for informed civic participation, develops students' abilities to counter or resist the effects of political polarization and partisanship. Throughout the simulation, which has been implemented in Virginia and Wisconsin, students are asked to…

Preparing to become a music teacher educator is a complex process and one component of this process should be learning to model, demonstrate, and teach assessment practices to preservice music educators. The purpose of this exploratory qualitative study was to discover how, and to what extent, music teacher educators (MTEs) are educated about…

Historically, colleges have used standardized testing to determine whether a student is ready for college-level work or requires developmental courses first, but this method has been criticized as inaccurate. To obtain more accurate placements, nearly three-quarters of colleges now use multiple measures assessment (MMA) systems. These systems…

While there has been a recent focus on developing programs to support educational research by community college anatomy and physiology instructors, there is not yet an established long-term community of practice (CoPs) in this particular area. Studies of long-term CoPs, particularly in STEM education, are few and far between. This study examines…

Today three-fourths of those enrolled in undergraduate programs are nontraditional students, defined by the National Center for Education Statistics as adults with one or more of these characteristics: delayed enrollment into postsecondary education, attended part time, financially independent, worked full time while enrolled, had dependents other…

Research suggests that using only standardized placement test scores to determine which new college students should take developmental coursework is inadequate, as many students may be unnecessarily assigned to developmental courses. These courses generally take one or more semesters to complete, delaying entry into college-level coursework, and…

Because of COVID-19 precautions, instructors worldwide were required to introduce a variety of virtual instruction modes to complete the Spring 2020 semester. Herein we describe parallel efforts in contextualized chemistry courses at two institutions--Carthage College and Central Michigan University. These courses are primarily designed for…

The Decoding the Disciplines methodology aims to teach students to think like experts in discipline-specific tasks. The central aspect of the methodology is to identify a bottleneck in the course content: a particular topic that a substantial number of students struggle to master. The current study compared the efficacy of standard lecture and…

Increasingly, students training in the biological sciences depend on a proper grounding in biological statistics, data science and experimental design. As biological datasets increase in size and complexity, transparent data management and analytical methods are essential skills for undergraduate biologists. We propose that using the software R…

Forbidden Sounds: The Music of the Holocaust considers the historical events of the Holocaust in the context of music. The honors course explores diverse roles that music played during the years 1933-1945, including the Nazi use of music as a means for censorship and discrimination; music performance and creation in various Jewish ghettos and…

Students in The Honors College at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh are required to take a team-taught first-year seminar in their first semester. The seminar is theme-based and taught by two professors from two different disciplines. The theme of the seminar is food, one teacher is a professor of geography and the other a professor of…

In January 2021, Eric Loepp, a faculty member in the department of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and Will Hinz, a member of the student government, administered a survey to students in order to answer big questions surrounding higher education during the fall 2020 semester. Like other institutions, theirs was working…

This essay explores the implications of new managerialist policies entwined with right-wing ideological challenges for social justice teaching in higher education. We engage with reflexive memos of our experiences as social justice teacher educators and scholars, placing them in institutional and political context, to frame an analysis of how…

This study concerns the nationally available, high-stakes, performance-based assessment for teacher candidates called the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) and its impact on visual arts teacher education in Wisconsin, where it is required for certification. Participants in this case study were 10 visual arts teacher educators at…

Increasing costs and decreasing numbers of university Extension faculty have made it difficult to provide quality turfgrass short course education. In response, faculty from nine institutions collaborated to develop the Great Lakes School of Turfgrass Science. This 12-week online course provides students with unique learning experiences through a…