Under the new ABET accreditation framework, students are expected to demonstrate "an ability to develop and conduct appropriate experimentation, analyze and interpret data, and use engineering judgment to draw conclusions." Traditional, recipe-based labs provide few opportunities for students to engage in realistic experimental design or…

To enhance students' learning and help them understand the whole picture of the field of inorganic chemistry, an inorganic laboratory technique course was designed that uses scaffolded, inquiry-based lab experiments and project-based learning. The scaffolded, inquiry-based laboratories taught in the first 8 weeks of the course helped students…

Team projects can optimize educational resources in a laboratory, but also create the potential for social loafing. Allowing students to choose their own groups could increase their motivation to learn and improve academic performance. To test this hypothesis, final grades and feedback from students were compared for the same course in two…

This paper describes the structure and activities of READ (Reading Effectively Across the Disciplines), a pilot initiative to improve students' critical reading skills, disciplinary literacy and academic success. READ employs a multimodal design that consists of faculty training in disciplinary literacy instruction and curricular enhancement,…

Workshops on the research process and plagiarism were designed to meet the needs of international students at the University at Albany. The research process workshop covered formulating research questions, as well as locating and evaluating sources. The plagiarism workshop focused on acknowledging sources, quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing…