Values affirmation exercises have been implemented in many contexts to combat stereotype threat in students from marginalized populations; the exercises are intended to fortify students by prompting them to self-affirm their values in short writing activities. Within the physics education research community, the style of intervention was…

Dropout and low academic performance at university level constitute a big current challenge. In this work, materials comprising different interactive tools were developed following instructional design, rooted in the cognitive load theory. They were applied in a first-year lecture chemistry course to tackle low academic performance and high…

To test the hypothesis that students who complete remote online tests experience an 'online grade penalty', we compared performance outcomes of second-year students who elected to complete exams online to those who completed face-to-face, paper-based tests in an organic chemistry course. We pursued the following research questions: (RQ1) Are there…

Student motivation is widely regarded as an essential prerequisite for learning and success. To learn more about biology student motivation and how it changes over time, pre/post-surveys were administered to a large introductory biology course during the fall of 2015. These pre/post-surveys contained motivation subscales from the Intrinsic…

Sustainable development requires the valuing of Indigenous knowledges. The complex and intertwined processes of coloniality and globalisation have contributed to spreading a dominant set of Western knowledge, values, and practices discrediting local Indigenous knowledges and wisdom (Thaman, 2003). Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4),…

Achievement motivation theories propose that student motivation is composed of multiple factors. Models of self-regulated learning adopt this assumption and further articulate that multiple metacognitive processes--planning, monitoring learning, and self-evaluation--are essential to guide progress toward a learning goal. Learners' motivations are…

The current short-term longitudinal study investigated the role of college students' identity development and motivational beliefs in predicting their chemistry achievement and intentions to leave science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors. We collected 4 waves of data over 1 semester from 363 diverse undergraduate STEM students…

Research in chemistry education has highlighted a number of variables that predict learning and performance, such as teacher-student interactions, academic motivation and metacognition. Most of this chemistry research has examined these variables by identifying dyadic relationships through bivariate correlations. The main purpose of this study was…

The purpose of this study is to identify academically at-risk students in first-semester general chemistry using affective characteristics via cluster analysis. Through the clustering of six preselected affective variables, three distinct affective groups were identified: low (at-risk), medium, and high. Students in the low affective group…