As information and communication technologies and learner characteristics in higher education develop, so do distance education methods, which are implemented at various levels by higher education institutions. The involvement of students in the learning process is one of the most crucial factors to consider throughout the distance education…

As a learner-centered pedagogy, project-based learning (PBL) is recognized to improve students' engagement and long-term learning effectiveness. The present PBL practices are based on instructor-defined topics and are assigned as a partial or full substitution of traditional assessments. Here, open-topic PBL as an opt-in activity is proposed and…

Active learning is known to improve student outcomes in many STEM courses. Here, we present strategies for incorporating active learning into a large enrollment General Chemistry I course using small group activities during class time. This approach was found to mitigate gender disparities in overall course grades and reduced the number of General…

Self-construal refers to the process by which individuals define the self in relation to others. It underpins cognition, motivation, and social behavior. While the importance of the self is well acknowledged in the field of second language (L2) learning motivation, how self-construal is associated with L2 learning motivation in project-based…

Purpose: This study aims to evaluate student motivation before and after the summer internship, in other words, to evaluate whether the summer internship affects male and female motivations differently. Design/methodology/approach: Investigating whether the motivation score predicts grade point average was included by adopting a quantitative…

Background: Even among women who persist in the gender-imbalanced engineering fields, women on engineering design teams tend to take on non-technical roles. Understanding the mechanisms that inform this phenomenon is important for encouraging more women in STEM in order to close the gender gap. Although factors such as self-efficacy, task…

The educational podcast is a didactic resource requiring specific planning to create a digital audio file with educational content. These podcasts promote meaningful learning and stimulate cognitive skills. This study aimed to analyze the effectiveness of educational podcasts in increasing students' satisfaction and performance in content…

Gender becomes one of the essential factors that are always considered in the various relationships among variables in the educational field. The purpose of this study is to examine the involvement of gender differences in the enhancement of college students' English achievement using inquiry-based learning. A quasi-experimental two-way factorial…

A study conducted by the Mathematical Association of America showed that calculus not only has significant effects on students' decision to pursue STEM fields, but also on their attitudes towards mathematics. Inspired by this large-scale study, the present study sought to deepen the current understanding of the impact of calculus on student…

A study was done at a mid-sized public university in the Midwest of the United States. At this university, there are three large classes taught in Student-Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies (SCALE-UP) classrooms: algebra-based introductory physics, calculus-based introductory physics, and introductory statistics.…

Water sciences education is paramount to sustainable groundwater resource management, especially of drinking water, but misunderstandings about groundwater among non-experts remain widespread. Groundwater residence is an especially challenging concept to learn because it is not directly visible in typical circumstances. The present study uses a…

Background: Research shows that active pedagogies could play an important role in achieving more equitable outcomes for diverse groups of students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Although flipped classes are a popular active methodology, there is a lack of high-quality studies assessing their impact in ecologically…

Active learning techniques are being use with increasing frequency in the classroom and more time is being dedicated to designing and implementing them. However, the literature still suffers from a lack of rigorous empirical methods to test the effects of simulations. Most of the claimed benefits of utilizing simulations, and other active learning…

Overwhelming evidence demonstrating the benefits of active-learning pedagogy has led to a shift in teaching that requires students to interact more in the classroom. To date, few studies have assessed whether there are gender-specific differences in participation in active-learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses,…

The application of social network analysis (SNA) has recently grown prevalent in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education research. Research on classroom networks has led to greater understandings of student persistence in physics majors, changes in their career-related beliefs (e.g., physics interest), and their academic…