Self-regulated learning (SRL) is the metacognitive aspect of learning that goes beyond learning content and skills. With SRL, students are aware of their content understanding and learning progress and use advanced thinking skills to create goals and improve their academic achievement. In this action research, SRL strategies were integrated into…

This article describes and illustrates a physics course for first-year college students whose only knowledge of physics is that they do not like the subject. The physics content is driven entirely by what appears in the daily newspapers and generally covers most physics topics in a semester. This course was structured as a learning community that…

Symbols are a cornerstone of the written language of physics and mathematics but inconsistencies in their use pose a challenge to students. This article reports on interviews held with first-year undergraduate physics students, focused on their early experiences with symbols in university physics. Students reported being confused by the symbolic…

This paper describes an alternative approach to teaching and learning practices in an undergraduate physics laboratory. The instructor plans and implements the 5E instructional model into the laboratory instruction. The article includes an example of the 5E lesson for the laboratory component of a physics course, which has separate lecture and…

Many methods have been developed for managing groups in active learning classes, but little research has been done on the effect of group structure itself. Results are presented for an active learning physics class in which half of the class was placed in academically homogeneous groups while the other half was in heterogeneous groups. Students…

This article showcases how a physics lab course was successfully redesigned to promote important reasoning abilities not explicitly addressed in the typical college setting. Student development of such abilities is essential for sound decision making, particularly when living in an information age. Essential features of our guiding curricular…

Although peer interaction in the college classroom may benefit some students by developing peer networks for future collaborations, prior research has suggested that these relationships most often benefit students from overrepresented communities, while minoritized student populations may gain less from these experiences. In this article, we…

Many large-lecture introductory science courses for nonscience majors do not have a lab component and hence do not provide much opportunity for students to engage in the practice of science. I have developed a new instructional activity called Dorm Room Labs that enables students to conduct hands-on activities as homework (or dorm room work) to…

Clickers are often used as an active learning tool in face-to-face classes to enhance student engagement and assess student learning. In this article we share the variety of ways that we use clicker questions to promote deliberate practice in large science courses. Deliberate practice is the use of specifically structured exercises that develop…

This article describes a general education course offering, Physics and the Arts. During the development of this course, physics and arts faculty collaborated closely. We cover the usual physics phenomena for such a course--light, color, and sound--in addition to gravity, equilibrium, and spacetime. Goals of the course are to increase students'…

On graduation, teacher candidates (TCs) are typically underprepared to teach science, particularly physical science, whereas physics graduates frequently lack training in teaching or effective communication. In response, we created two models for interdisciplinary peer learning where TCs were paired with either graduate or undergraduate physics…

We compare student learning and perception data from astronomy, physics, and geology courses taught in a traditional classroom with individual desks to the same classes taught in a large auditorium. In a large student sample (1,593 students), there is no clear difference between rooms in measures of failure rates or average final grades. However,…

This study measures the effects of increased faculty-student engagement on student learning, success rates, and perceptions in a Physical Oceanography course. The study separately implemented two teaching methods that had been shown to be successful in a different discipline, introductory physics. These methods were the use of interactive…

Successfully creating and implementing interdisciplinary curricula in introductory science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses is challenging, but doing so is increasingly more important as current problems in science become more interdisciplinary. Opening up the silos between science disciplines and overcoming common…

In the early 1900s science magazines were published with a goal of interesting and exciting the public about science and technology. Articles described technology that was possible and perhaps even tested, but never embraced because of practical limitations. Articles were written in an effort to instill creativity in the reader and to stimulate…