A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in students' beliefs on the relevance of physics but frequently the results show a negative shift in students'…

Recently, 57 undergraduate students at the University of Michigan were assigned the task of solving a crystal structure, given only the electron density map of a 1.3 Å crystal structure from the electron density server, and the position of the N-terminal amino acid. To test their knowledge of amino acid chemistry, the students were not given the…

An online instructional database containing information on commonly used pieces of laboratory equipment was created. In order to make the database highly accessible and to promote its use, QR codes were utilized. The instructional materials were available anytime and accessed using QR codes located on the equipment itself and within undergraduate…

This biochemistry laboratory course was designed to provide significant learning experiences to expose students to different ways of succeeding as scientists in academia and foster development and improvement of their potential and competency as the next generation of investigators. To meet these goals, the laboratory course employs three…

This article evaluates a validity argument for the degree to which assessment tasks are able to provide evidence about knowledge that fuses information from a progression of core disciplinary ideas in ecology and a progression for the scientific practice of developing evidence-based explanations. The article describes the interpretive framework…

This study examined the historical performance of students at Michigan State University in 12 life sciences courses over 13 yr to find variables impacting student success. Hierarchical linear modeling predicted 25.0-62.8% of the variance in students' grades in the courses analyzed. The primary predictor of a student's course grade was his or her…

This study examined the historical performance of students at Michigan State University in a two-part biochemistry series Biochem I (n = 5,900) and Biochem II (n = 5,214) for students enrolled from 1997 to 2009. Multiple linear regressions predicted 54.9-87.5% of the variance in student from Biochem I grade and 53.8-76.1% of the variance in…

This study reports on our steps toward achieving a conceptually coherent and empirically validated learning progression for carbon cycling in socio-ecological systems. It describes an iterative process of designing and analyzing assessment and interview data from students in upper elementary through high school. The product of our development…

For the past eight years the University of Michigan has offered two different styles of biochemistry courses each semester, one a standard lecture-based and discussion-section (SLB) course and one a self-paced, non-lecture Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) course. We tracked student responses to selected exam questions that were used in…