Data reproducibility is becoming increasingly important in the social sciences, but it has yet to be incorporated into many undergraduate sociology programs. This note describes a service-learning activity that can be added to an introductory statistics course. Students partner with a nonprofit and analyze quantitative data to answer questions…

Over the past 10 years, the authors of this paper have implemented a series of project-based and inquiry-based learning initiatives in the calculus sequence at our institution. These initiatives took place in a department with an existing strong culture supporting teaching innovation and improvement. In this paper, we describe three initiatives in…

Many students associate grades with the completion of course work rather than learning the course content. While research has heavily focused on teaching strategies and instructional tools to improve students' learning in general chemistry, less focus has been given to assessments as a learning tool to improve students learning. Standards-based…

The main goal of this article is to develop a Management System for Merging Learning Objects (msMLO), which offers an approach that retrieves learning objects (LOs) based on students' learning styles and term-based queries, which produces a new outcome with a better score. The msMLO faces the task of retrieving LOs via two steps: The first step…

As part of a campus-wide effort to transform introductory science courses to be more engaging and more accurately convey the excitement of discovery in science, the curriculum of an introductory physical geology lab course was redesigned. What had been a series of ''cookbook'' lab activities was transformed into a sequence of activities based on…

Much has already been written on the controversies surrounding the use of different test theories in educational assessment. Other authors have noted the prevalence of classical test theory over item response theory in practice. This Special Issue draws together articles based upon work conducted on the Reliability Programme for England's…

The purpose of the Test for English Majors (TEM) is to measure the English proficiency of Chinese university undergraduates majoring in English Language and Literature and to examine whether these students meet the required levels of English language abilities as specified in the National College English Teaching Syllabus for English Majors…

Many undergraduate institutions are dealing with less-than-prepared students entering the biology major. When the biology department at College of Notre Dame of Maryland analyzed data from five past cohorts of prospective biology majors, it was evident that there was a significant correlation between their success in the introductory course in the…

At most land-grant universities in the USA, Introduction to Soil Science is traditionally taught using a combination of lecture and laboratory formats. To promote engagement, improve comprehension, and enhance retention of content by students, we developed a problem-based learning (PBL) introductory soil science course. Students work in groups to…

A large-enrollment, undergraduate cellular biology lecture course is described whose primary goal is to help students acquire skill in the interpretation of experimental data. The premise is that this kind of analytical reasoning is not intuitive for most people and, in the absence of hands-on laboratory experience, will not readily develop unless…