Background: To master the secondary-tertiary transition into fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), academic self-beliefs play a pivotal role, especially those related to learning mathematics. The framework of expectancy-value theory has been used widely in primary and secondary education and partly in tertiary…

In a previous publication we examined the connections between high-school computer science (CS) and computing higher education. The results were promising -- students who were exposed to computing in high school were more likely to take one of the computing disciplines. However, these correlations were not necessarily causal. Possibly those…

The aim of this study was to verify if the UTAUT model, enriched with anxiety and factors relating to students characteristics and to the specificities of online courses, influences persistence in online courses. A theoretical model encompassing 13 variables was tested. Three moderating variables (gender, age and prior online course experience)…

In 2020, Higher Education institutions were pressed to swiftly implement online-based teaching. Among many challenges associated with this, lecturers in Higher Education needed to promptly and flexibly adapt their teaching to these circumstances. This investigation adopts a resilience framing in order to shed light on which specific challenges…

When it comes to what higher education students know about sustainability, where they learn matters. In this study, we explore the extent to which students' level of sustainability knowledge differed according to where they previously learned about the environment. In an online survey administered to undergraduate students enrolled at Michigan…

Reading research has recognized the strong relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension. However, we are still perplexed by the precise nature of how readers access and retrieve word meanings while reading. We have not reached a consensus on "what it means to know a word" (e.g., Anderson & Nagy, 1991; Nation, 2001) or…

This quasi-experimental study investigated the impact of visual art making on the cortisol levels of 39 healthy adults. Participants provided saliva samples to assess cortisol levels before and after 45 minutes of art making. Participants also provided written responses about the experience at the end of the session. Results indicate that art…

Purpose: There is evidence that students who attend Technical and Further Education (TAFE) prior to entering higher education underperform in their first year of study. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of self-efficacy in understanding the performance of students who completed TAFE in the previous year in a first year subject of…

Many recent studies have stressed the importance of teacher candidates' (TCs) self-regulated learning (SRL) skills for successful learning. Because of the promising consequences of SRL for academic performance, teacher educators (TEs) are encouraged to increase TCs' SRL opportunities in educational programs. Because of the difficulty and…

This paper explains the application of concept mapping to help foster a learning-centred approach. It investigates how concept maps are used to measure the change in learning following a two-week intensive undergraduate Marketing Principles course delivered to 162 Chinese students undertaking a Bachelor of Business Administration programme in…

Prior learning assessment (PLA) is the process of evaluating learning, regardless of when or where the learning occurred, and, if the learning is at the college level, awarding college credit to the possessor of that learning. This article provides an overview of the PLA program at a large public U.S. institution and presents the findings of the…

Despite a burgeoning body of empirical research on "the international student experience", the area remains under-theorized. The literature to date lacks a guiding conceptual model that captures the adjustment and adaptation trajectories of this unique, growing, and important sojourner group. In this paper, we therefore put forward a…

General education students taking freshman-level physical geography and geomorphology classes at Arizona State University completed an online laboratory whose main tool was Google Earth. Early in the semester, oblique and planimetric views introduced students to a few volcanic, tectonic, glacial, karst, and coastal landforms. Semi-quantitative…

This study attempted to determine the influence of prior knowledge in mathematics of students on learner-interface interactions in a learning-by-teaching intelligent tutoring system. One hundred thirty-nine high school students answered a pretest (i.e., the prior knowledge in mathematics) and a posttest. In between the pretest and posttest, they…

Many instructors strive to encourage student reading outside of class and active learning in class. One pedagogical tool, structured reading questions, can help do both. Using examples from question sets across six courses, the authors illustrate how reading questions can help students achieve the six active-learning principles described by…