We describe a novel, university-level, introductory biology course that uses evolution as a narrative framework. Our course conveys the content in an introductory biology course by telling the story of the evolution of life on Earth. We begin with early Earth environments in which biological molecules and processes evolved and led to the first…

I conducted a set of four studies to catalogue and examine course elements, including active learning strategies and evidence-based teaching practices, and their influence on student experiences and performance in college biology classes. In the first study, I defined the term "active learning" and catalogued the 300[plus] strategies…

The current study measures the extent to which students' self-regulated learning tactics and learning outcomes change as the result of a deliberate, data-driven improvement in the learning design of mastery-based online learning modules. In the original design, students were required to attempt the assessment once before being allowed to access…

Logistic regression (LoR) is a foundational supervised machine learning algorithm and yet, unlike linear regression, appears rarely taught early on, where analogy and proximity to linear regression would be an advantage. A random sample of 50 syllabi from undergraduate business statistics courses shows only two percent of the courses included LoR.…

The present study attempted to explore if learning is as effective in the web-based platform as it is in the traditional or web-enhanced modalities. Unlike prior studies that measured learning using course grades and subjective student reporting, this study used an empirical method to develop a valid and reliable measure of learning. Data from 346…

This article examines the impact of prison tours on students' understanding of prisons, their ability to empathize and understand the viewpoints of others, and their attitudes toward punishment. The research participants were undergraduate students enrolled in various sections of an introductory criminology course. Students in some sections of the…

Statistics educators have been investigating how students' attitudes change in the introductory statistics course for many years. Typically, an overall decrease in mean attitudes over the course has been noted. However, when and how do students' attitudes change during the term? Do they steadily decrease or is there a point when students'…

Self-assessment is essential to scientific literacy as stated by the National Research Council Committee on Conceptual Framework for the New K-12 Science Education Standards and has since been incorporated into the Next Generation Science Standards. However, little empirical evidence documents which instructional tools are beneficial in improving…

Students' success in undergraduate STEM courses requires effective studying behavior, but also the motivation to enact it. Promoting students' achievement in STEM has commonly focused on either study strategies (cognitive) or motivational interventions; we hypothesized that combinations of these would be more effective. Using a Learning Management…

Burgeoning college enrolments and insufficient funding to higher education have expanded the use of large lecture courses. As this trend continues, it is important to ensure that students can still learn in those challenging learning environments. Within education broadly and undergraduate engineering specifically, active learning pedagogies have…

This study uses homogeneity in personal learning styles and heterogeneity in subject knowledge for collaborative learning group decomposition indicating that groups are "mixed" in nature. Homogeneity within groups was formed using K-means clustering and greedy search, whereas heterogeneity imbibed using agenda-driven search. For checking…

Embedding active learning is a common mechanism for meeting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education reform goals. Researchers have identified student benefits from such strategies, yet these benefits may not be universal for all students. We sought to identify how students at a nontraditional university perceive…

Developing a global mind-set in college students is a goal of many colleges and universities. Most often this goal is met by encouraging students to study abroad. This article explains how a service learning student engagement program at home achieves this goal by pairing Introduction to Sociology students with young immigrant children in a weekly…

To determine how topical coverage in introductory textbooks may have changed from the 1980s to the present, the author examined topic coverage in full-length and brief introductory textbooks from this time period. Because 98% of the teachers use textbooks for the introductory course and the majority do not assign reading beyond the textbook, the…

Learning a foreign language promotes new ways of seeing the world and the self in relation to it (Gee, 1996), making practices and perspectives underlined through the acquisition of vocabulary and grammatical structures available for appropriation (Bakhtin, 1981; Kramsch, 1993, 2009). Using a combination of interviews and self-reported…