Institutions of higher education often have multiple entry points for first-time and transfer college students to engage in high-impact educational practices (HIPs), well documented to advance student learning outcomes. Some students may seek out repeated opportunities while others engage very little or not at all in activities such as…

Students of diverse abilities tend to be divided into groups that advocate academic homogeneity. Ability grouping practice is embedded within the contemporary hyper-accountability culture in education that has shifted the focus of the teaching community from promoting academic attainment in pupils to being highly ranked in the market-based…

Step Up to Physical Science and Engineering at Randolph(SUPER) is a recruitment and retention program for natural science and mathematics majors at Randolph College, a small liberal arts college in central Virginia. Begun as a pilot program in 2010, and then funded by two National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarships in Science, Technology,…

Statistical mechanics has received limited attention in physics education research and remains a relatively underrepresented topic even in research on upper-division physics courses. The purpose of this study was to explore potential challenges that physics students encounter when they solve statistical mechanics problems in groups. Adopting a…

Despite calls to modernize education preparation, the way we train, support, and grow educators has remained largely unchanged for decades. But some educator training and professional development organizations are taking a different approach by offering educators flexible and job-embedded learning opportunities that recognize and validate learning…

Instructors of college level business courses utilize group assignments to stress the importance of collaborative work in professional organizations for students. How instructors determine team formation, whether assigning students to groups or allowing students to form their own groups, could impact the effectiveness of the group regarding their…

Different from the group formation approaches led by teachers, learners' generative learning objectives and the independent choice of collaborative partners are important in the Internet learning environment. This study takes the cMOOC (connectivist massive open online course) 5.0 "Internet + education: dialogue between theory and…

Grouping by attainment is a relatively new and contested practice in Norway, where strong historical discourses of heterogeneous education are under pressure from international test comparisons, particularly in mathematics. At the same time, research indicates that Norwegian teachers have a high degree of autonomy in education policy enactment.…

This research draws on evidence from three qualifications taken in autumn 2020, when comparative judgement (CJ) was used as a key source of data in setting grade boundaries. In these cases, a separate CJ exercise was completed for each individual paper in the qualification so that standards could be maintained from a previous series. In this…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to explain the link between traditional same-age school structure and the impact this has on a school's capacity for individual and organisational learning; second, to explain why attempts to develop schools as learning organisations (LOs) invariably reify existing structures and practice,…

In the United Kingdom (UK) particularly, grouping strategies in secondary education have attracted considerable political attention. While setting students by ability is frequently adopted in mathematics, English and science, mixed-ability grouping is common in other subjects, including physical education (PE). Educational research exploring…

The purpose of this article is two-fold. Firstly, we consider whether the setting up of mixed-gender focus group sessions has the potential as a research process to contribute to transforming people's understandings of their gendered relationships. Secondly, we relate our discussion to the question of the mutability of stereotypical thinking in…

Higher education institutions do not have a history of being racially inclusive, and as a result, research and best practices around retention and student success have not been developed for underrepresented and minoritized students. Although there has been a surge in scholarship on diversifying higher education, literature, and identifying best…

As part of a wider study into the educational attitudes and experiences of white, working-class male pupils in the north of England, this paper explored the ways that male pupils in years 10 and 11 navigated and experienced the six-level (A-F) academic banding system present in their British mainstream secondary school (Ayrefield Community…

While scholars have found that undergraduate involvement in research is beneficial, the lack of such experiences in the social sciences and humanities is glaring. This paper analyzes how an emphasis on community through cohort models impacts undergraduate student experience in research, taking from the Emerging Scholars Program, an…