Educational tools like EdPuzzle, PlayPosit, and Kaltura have gained recent attention, as they purportedly empower educators to incorporate questions, quizzes, and discussions into instructional videos. However, there is no empirical evidence on how or under what circumstances these platforms may impact students' learning. A quasi-experimental…

This study leverages national data and a quasi-experimental design to examine the influence of enrolling in an exclusively online degree program on students' likelihood of completing their degree. We find that enrolling in an exclusively online degree program had a negative influence on students' likelihood of completing their bachelor's degree or…

This article explores prevalent stories about "Gen Z" students that unintentionally undercut both their success and learner-centered pedagogies. The authors consider how those beliefs might be reframed to serve all learners more effectively. We also explore how the racial reckoning, health pandemics, social unrest, and additional…

The goal of the present study was to examine whether college students' learning would be impacted by an innovative teaching strategy--the presentation of Secure Attachment Messaging (SAM) during lecture. Students (N = 205) were presented with SAM every other week as part of the regular PowerPoint slides. At the end of each class, they completed a…

This brief presents Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as a transformative exploratory tool for critical and curious educators. YPAR has been defined as a collaborative method of youth, with the support of caring adults, participating in research to explore social issues that impact them, with the end goal of taking action to improve the…

The Students Assessing Teaching and Learning (SATAL) Program at the University of California, Merced offers assessment support for faculty and program leads while engaging diverse, cross-program undergraduates in students-as- partners experiences in a work setting. Grounded in the Students as Partners (SaP) principles of respect, responsibility,…

In this work, the online offering of a sophomore electrical and computer engineering hands-on course at UC Davis during COVID-19 pandemic is discussed. In response to California's social distancing guidelines, the course was abruptly moved from in-person to remote instruction. To overcome the challenges inherent in remote instruction, we employed…

Block-based programming languages (BBLs) have been proposed as a way to prepare students for learning to program in more sophisticated, text-based languages, such as Java. Hybrid BBLs add the ability to view and edit the block commands in auto-generated, text-based code. We compared the use of a non-hybrid BBL (Scratch), a hybrid BBL (Pencil…

The authors are a group of Western-trained biologists (seven students and one faculty member) from diverse cultural backgrounds, who spent a semester exploring how they might complement their epistemological approach to addressing real-world problems by including possibilities outside the Western-scientific methodology. Their study focused on how…

Over the past two years, Pullias Center researchers and practitioners from the nonprofit Get Schooled have collaborated on a project designed to boost first year persistence and success at California State University, Dominguez Hills. This brief is intended to share outcomes and lessons learned from implementing the texting component of Get…

Mathematics faculty created a model for intermediate algebra integrating principles from the science of learning. The redesigned curriculum revolved around two big ideas (solving and graphing) and provided students with information about the formation of long-term memories, the benefits of distributed practice, the impact of physiological aspects…

Declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic by the World Health Organization in 2020 forced many schools to switch to emergency virtual instruction. This situation provided an opportunity to explore the effectiveness of online learning from students' perspectives. To discover best practices for online learning, 584 STEM students at California State…

Increasingly, young adults with autism spectrum disorder are attending 4-year universities. The transition to adulthood can be challenging for these students, and university life poses its own set of demands. The present article takes a mixed-methods approach by including two studies utilizing complementary methodologies. Through in-depth…

Over the past few years, language teaching has progressively evolved from teacher-fronted classroom settings to more complex, learner-centered scenarios, allowing learners to explore authentic contents, work collaboratively, and create sophisticated and socially relevant products. In addition, these processes foster language learning, increase…

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'…