Many university-level electrical engineering courses continue to use textbooks as curriculum scaffolds, prescribed texts, and/or reference volumes. Textbook reliance is even more pronounced in courses that teach foundational principles of the discipline, such as introductory circuit theory. This paper reports on the conceptual coverage of…

Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) have been used in traditional university classrooms as a strategy to check for student understanding (Angelo & Cross, 1993). With the emergence of online learning and its popularity for non-traditional students, it is equally important that instructors in the online environment check for student…

Students' inaccurate ideas about what is represented by chemical equations and concepts underlying stoichiometry are well documented; however, there are few classroom-ready instructional solutions to help students build scientifically accurate ideas about these topics central to learning chemistry. An intervention (two inquiry-based activities)…

This study used an interactive dynamic simulation of action potential to explore social practices of learning among first year undergraduate biology students. It aimed to create a learning environment that fosters knowledge building discourse through working with multiple concept-specific representations. Three hundred and eighty-nine students and…

Designed for students and educational professionals researching students' movement into and through higher education, "Crafting and Conducting Research on Student Transitions" is a concise resource, describing both qualitative and quantitative methods. The authors walk readers through the process of selecting a topic, designing a study,…

More than a decade after Prensky's influential articulation of digital natives and immigrants, disagreement exists around these characterizations of students and the impact of such notions within higher education. Perceptions of today's undergraduate learners as tech-savvy "digital natives" (Prensky, 2001a), who both want and need the…

Higher education frequently uses weighted mean faculty salaries to compare either across institutions, or to evaluate an institution's salary growth over time. Unfortunately, faculty salaries are an extraordinarily complex phenomenon that cannot be legitimately reduced to a single number any more than the academic construct of skills, knowledge,…

Despite concerted efforts by science educators to understand patterns of evolutionary reasoning in science students and teachers, the vast majority of evolution education studies have failed to carefully consider or control for item feature effects in knowledge measurement. Our study explores whether robust contextualization patterns emerge within…

It is widely believed that administrative expenditures in US higher education are growing too rapidly, particularly in relation to expenditures that are directly related to instruction, and that this so-called "administrative bloat" is a major factor in the rising cost of higher education. We argue that this perception of rapid growth is…

Background/Context: Many children of immigrants are not enrolled in high schools that sufficiently meet their needs, and subsequently, many are not making a successful transition to, and/or successfully completing, higher education. As immigration grows in the United States, educators and policy makers must understand how the educational processes…

Many claim that a college degree is worth a million dollars, but like so many other "facts" about higher education in the United States, it is not quite right. Indeed, using a set of reasonable assumptions that factors in school selectivity, the cost of a college education, and foregone wages, I show that the million dollar figure is…

Job satisfaction was examined for 55 self-identified college graduates with learning disabilities (LD) and 55 control graduates matched by gender, major, degree, and graduation year. Graduates with LD perceived themselves as receiving significantly less pay and promotion opportunities, and reported less total job satisfaction than graduates…

Citation analysis of freshman papers and faculty publications provided ranked order lists of journals: (1) retrieved from InfoTrac stations; (2) cited in freshman papers; (3) in which faculty publish; (4) cited in faculty articles; and (5) most frequently cited in published articles worldwide. Results emphasized the importance of recognizing…