The ability to collaborate with culturally diverse groups is essential, not only to further scientific knowledge but also to solve complex global problems. However, not all students have opportunities to develop intercultural competencies through study abroad programs, due to various issues such as cost, rigid curriculum, and unrelated field of…

We describe how a practical instructional development process helped a first-year assistant professor rapidly develop, implement, and assess the impact on her Analytical Chemistry course caused by three changes: (a) moving the lab into the same semester as the lecture, (b) developing a more collaborative classroom environment, and (c) increasing…

This paper describes the development of BOLE, a MATLAB-based interactive learning environment, that facilitates the process of learning bio-inspired optimization algorithms, and that is dedicated exclusively to unmanned aerial vehicle path planning. As a complement to conventional teaching methods, BOLE is designed to help students consolidate the…

Can students assess their peers on collaboration, a key practice in learning communities? The QUANTA program is a team-taught, two-semester coordinated studies program that is over 25 years old. The central governing ideas for the program are a belief in the social construction of knowledge, and recognition of the value of active, collaborative…

This article is grounded in social constructivist perspectives of learning: its purpose is to provide an overview of the "Interactions Sociales et Acquisition" (ISA) [Social Interactions and Acquisition] French group's research that examines how a peer-assisted learning (PAL) group context facilitates students' acquisition of motor and…

The "droso4schools" project aims to introduce the fruit fly "Drosophila" as a powerful modern teaching tool to convey curriculum-relevant specifications in biology lessons. Flies are easy and cheap to breed and have been at the forefront of biology research for a century, providing unique conceptual understanding of biology and…

Undergraduate biology labs often explore the techniques of data collection but neglect the statistical framework necessary to express findings. Students can be confused about how to use their statistical knowledge to address specific biological questions. Growth in the area of observational ecology requires that students gain experience in…

Collaborative problem solving is an essential component of any 21st century science career. Scientists are hired, retained, and promoted for solving problems in dynamic and interdisciplinary teams. They discuss issues, explain and justify their opinions, debate, elaborate, and reflect on their collective knowledge. At the same time, both…

Education systems are increasingly creating rich, longitudinal data sets with frequent, and even real-time, data updates of many student measures, including daily attendance, homework submissions, and exam scores. These data sets provide an opportunity for district and school staff members to move beyond an indicators-based approach and instead…

A laboratory experiment is described in which students synthesize a variety of cationic gemini surfactants and analyze their efficacy as fabric softeners. Students perform a simple organic synthesis reaction and two analytical tests (one qualitative and one quantitative), and use the class data to assess the synthesized products. The experiment…

In the current time of globalization, collaboration among people in virtual environments is becoming an important precondition of success. This trend is reflected also in the educational domain where students collaborate in various short-term groups created repetitively but changing in each round (e.g. in MOOCs). Students in these kind of dynamic…

Within the landscape of educational data, textual natural language is an increasingly vast source of learning-centered interactions. In natural language dialogue, student contributions hold important information about knowledge and goals. Automatically modeling the dialogue act of these student utterances is crucial for scaling natural language…

Titration experiments are ideal for generating large data sets for use in quantitative-analysis activities that are meaningful and transparent to general chemistry students. We report the successful implementation of a sophisticated quantitative exercise in which the students identify a series of unknown acids by determining their molar masses…

A graduate course, ETEC543 ("Technology and Learning I"), was revised to better serve increasing new student population, international students, in an academic program. Project-based learning, Google Docs, and instructional strategies fostering diversity and critical thinking were incorporated into the course redesign. Observations,…

This article describes a 13-week laboratory course called Human Toxicology taught at the University of Otago, New Zealand. This course used a guided inquiry based laboratory coupled with formative assessment and collaborative learning to develop in undergraduate students the skills of problem solving/critical thinking, data interpretation and…