The writing-to-learn (WTL) literature is varied in how assignments are structured and implemented in the classroom, making it difficult for instructors to identify how to incorporate writing effectively. Drawing on the WTL literature, the MWrite program was established to work with STEM faculty to design, implement, and assess evidence-based WTL…

Critical thinking is essential in academia and the workforce. Although writing can be used as a pedagogical tool for fostering deeper subject matter understanding, increased retention, and critical thinking, relatively few science courses are writing based. This writing-based introductory science course provided an opportunity for students to…

Epistemic beliefs are one's assumptions about knowledge and knowing. Given the research in educational psychology that established epistemic beliefs as reliable predictors of student success, we devised a pedagogical intervention to improve students' epistemic beliefs. In this study, we examined the effectiveness of the reflective writing task as…

The paper investigates the potential of utilizing artistic creation as an alternative task for assessing students in a non-artistic course within higher education. Eighteen postgraduate students of the Department of Pedagogy and Primary Education of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, after attending a six-hour course in…

In a technology-centric world, leveraging digital tools such as chatbots allows educators to engage students in ways that may be more accessible for both parties, particularly in large lecture classrooms. This report details the development of an interactive web-based chatbot to curate content for writing about chemistry in context. Students were…

Resonance is a fundamental concept that is necessary for students' successful learning in organic chemistry. However, there is a need to know more about both (1) what students find important when describing resonance and (2) students' conceptual understanding. This research seeks to address this discrepancy by examining second-semester organic…

Environmental content is becoming increasingly important in schools, but teachers may have difficulty grasping accurate knowledge. This study investigated how student teachers construct a conceptual understanding of biodiversity loss in an online environment. Sixty-five first-semester primary student teachers at a Finnish university were given the…

Thermodynamics and kinetics are key topics in the chemistry curriculum that pose challenges to students across a range of educational levels. These struggles arise from the complexity and mixed representations inherent to the topics. Additionally, while thermodynamics and kinetics are related, students struggle to make conceptually correct…

Learning to reason through organic reaction mechanisms is challenging for students because of the volume of reactions covered in introductory organic chemistry and the complexity of conceptual knowledge and reasoning skills required to develop meaningful understanding. However, understanding reaction mechanisms is valuable for students because…

In this paper, we introduce 'Concept Questions,' a weekly writing assignment that has been incorporated into multiple upper-level engineering courses at a single university with the intent of enhancing students' conceptual understanding of the course content. To explore the influence of this activity on students in these courses, we compared…

Both participation in dialog and exposure to others from different cultures have been theorized to increase the ability of an individual to be creative. This study focused on the multicultural student-to-student dialog that took place in one graduate level course. The purpose of this study was to explore how participation in this dialog might…

Writing anxiety is a term for a wide variety of apprehensive and pessimistic feelings about writing. The purpose of this study is to identify factors contributing to writing anxiety experienced by EFL students in writing essays and the strategies they apply to manage it. The possible factors of the anxiety were elaborated into close-ended…

For 12 years, Denise Gillman has taught the course Science on the Stage at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. The plays studied awaken intellectual curiosity and understanding of human nature and complex scientific ideas within the framework of a good story and can do so for students of every major. This article presents how…

Introductory-level laboratory courses provide students with hands-on experience using the discipline's tools and theories. These courses often rely on recipe-based experiments due to the constraints of large enrollments, short lab periods, and the desire to minimize complexity. In addition, covering a breadth of topics can lead to a fragmented…

The development of college students' cultural competence is important in an increasingly diverse world. This exploratory, qualitative, action research study examined how 158 first-year students understood and applied core concepts after participating in a standardized diversity and social justice lesson plan designed using transformative education…