While online courses provide opportunities for a range of assessment tools and resources, little is known about how lecturers might best provide assessment cues to support diverse cohorts. This study explored how lecturers communicate messages about assessment expectations to first-year students in two courses at an Australian regional university…

A cohort of first-year biology students was surveyed regarding their opinions and viewing habits for live and recorded lectures. Most respondents (87%) attended live lectures as a rule (attenders), with 66% attending more than two-thirds of the lectures. In contrast, only 52% accessed recordings and only 13% viewed more than two-thirds of the…

Educational techniques that improve student engagement have repeatedly been shown to improve performance at the class level at many institutions and in multiple disciplines. However, knowledge of engagement in individual activities in large first-year classes, where there may be several subpopulations of students in different programs reflecting…

College algebra (a university freshman level algebra course) fulfills the quantitative literacy requirement of many college's general education programs and is a terminal course for most who take it. An online problem-based learning environment provides a unique means of engaging students in quantitative discussions and research. This article…

This paper analyzes pre-post matched gains in the epistemological views of science students taking the introductory physics course at Beijing Normal University (BNU) in China. In this study we examined the attitudes and beliefs of science majors (n = 441) in four classes, one taught using traditional (lecture) teaching methods, and the other three…

While American students increasingly choose to study online, most professors remain skeptical of its quality. This paper explores the perspectives of history professors at a liberal arts institution regarding their general education classes taught face-to-face (F2F) and online, focusing on interactive communication with students between the two…

This study investigates students' "preference" for team learning and its effectiveness, compared to lecture-based learning. A quasi-experiment was set up in a financial accounting course in the first-year undergraduate of the Economics and Business Administration Program, where students had to choose between one of the two learning…

Our study compared a flipped class with a standard lecture class in four introductory courses: finite mathematics, precalculus, business calculus, and calculus 1. The flipped sections watched video lectures outside of class and spent time in class actively working on problems. The traditional sections had lectures in class and did homework outside…

At Binghamton, Calculus 1 is taught to over 1000 students each fall in sections of about 30-40 students, with graduate student instructors teaching most sections. Despite having small classrooms instead of lecture halls, the satisfaction and performance of students has historically been poor. We had hoped to improve student success by changing how…

Literature shows that attendance is an important bidirectional link in engaging students in learning. However, metacognitive awareness eludes many first-year students--particularly the disadvantaged, including those with low admission scores, English as a second language or coming from low socio-economic status (SES), migrant, or first-in-family…

Inherently a discovery-based pedagogy, Disassemble/Analyze/Assemble (DAA) activities start with the artefact--an instance of a typically well-engineered solution. Through systemized disassembly and the subsequent analysis of components, students engage in an iterative process of observation and follow-up probing. In-turn, this process helps…

This paper addresses the question: What is the value of an educational excursion for first year students enrolled in a 4 year pre-service professional teacher education degree at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa? The excursion is an integral part of a first year module that focuses on the personal and professional development of…

Purpose: This paper aims to be a response to the "Call for Papers" on challenges for the practice of, and new modes of questioning and delivery in, business education. The authors seek to do this through an investigation of the disadvantages and benefits associated with the move towards using online technologies in an on-campus…

The incidence and prevalence of alternative conceptions in science have been reported by a number of researchers. This article reports findings of a study involving the development and implementation of two intervention programmes to address alternative conceptions related to interference and diffraction of waves among 133 first year university…

This experimental study aims to investigate the effects of using cooperative learning to enhance the English reading comprehension and learning motivation of EFL freshmen by comparing the cooperative learning instruction and traditional lecture instruction. This experiment was implemented in a Freshman English Reading course, a two credit course,…