Anatomy and Physiology should be considered a gateway course due to its challenging scope and key role as a foundational prerequisite for many degree programs. Students often encounter gateway classes early in their college career when they are academically vulnerable due to their lack of university experience. A&P teaching methods are…

Problems with understanding concepts and mechanisms connected to plant movements have been diagnosed among biology students. Alternative conceptions in understanding these phenomena are marginally studied. The diagnosis was based on a sample survey of university students and their lecturers, which was quantitatively and qualitatively exploratory…

Studio-style course delivery involves the integration of laboratory activities with lecture elements of the course, with the goal of increasing student learning and satisfaction through directly linking laboratory and lecture concepts while focusing on active learning. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of studio delivery of an introductory…

This study examines the interest, motivation, and behavioral engagement of college students in an introductory course relative to three instructional formats used in the course: hands-on, problem-based laboratory stations; problem-based written case studies; and video lectures. Groups of five to seven students were assigned learning activities as…

A unit operations laboratory course was significantly modified to be an open-ended problem-based experience with an emphasis on teamwork and communication skills. Students were surveyed to assess gains in engineering self-efficacy as well as to indicate which course structure components were most beneficial to learning. Students showed significant…

The advent of new educational technologies has stimulated interest in using online videos to deliver content in university courses. We examined student engagement with 78 online videos that we created and were incorporated into a one-semester flipped introductory mechanics course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We found that students were…

Students often struggle in introductory health sciences courses; some students have difficulty in upper level classes. To address this, we converted three lecture/lab courses, traditional first-year Anatomy and Physiology (A&P I), upper level Biomechanics, and upper level Microbiology to an integrated studio model. We used the Student…

Twenty years ago, a major curriculum revision at a large, comprehensive university in the Western United States led to the implementation of an integrated lecture/laboratory (studio) experience for our engineering students taking general chemistry. Based on these twenty years of experience, construction of four purpose-built studio classrooms to…

Laboratory sections of university Earth science courses provide hands-on, inquiry-based activities for students in support of lecture and discussion. Here, I compare student conceptual knowledge outcomes of laboratory sections by administering an independent concept inventory at the beginning and end of two courses: one that had a lecture and a…

Exposure to organic chemistry concepts in the laboratory can positively affect student performance, learning new chemistry concepts and building motivation towards learning chemistry in the lecture. In this study, quantitative methods were employed to assess differences in student performance, learning, and motivation in an organic chemistry…

DNA microarray is an ordered grid containing known sequences of DNA, which represent many of the genes in a particular organism. Each DNA sequence is unique to a specific gene. This technology enables the researcher to screen many genes from cells or tissue grown in different conditions. We developed an undergraduate lecture and laboratory…

In a study spanning several years and including more than 1600 students, lab attendance was strongly correlated with lab grades (r = 0.64), lecture attendance (r = 0.49), and course grades (r = 0.60) in an introductory biology course. Regardless of the semester, lab attendance was lowest during the first week of the semester, and students who…