Metaphors are well-known tools for teaching statistics to novices. However, educators might overlook metaphor theoretical developments that offer nuanced and testable perspectives on their pedagogical applications. This article introduces the notion of metaphor types--"correspondence" (CO) and "class inclusion" (CI)--as…

Simulation methodology has moved toward using different types of real-world scenario-based learning constructs to improve applied understanding of political science concepts and theories. This type of active learning has become popular in the upper divisions of undergraduate and graduate political science. This reflection addresses the variance in…

Data science is a new field of research that has attracted growing interest in recent years as it focuses on turning raw data into understanding, insight, knowledge, and value. New data science education programs, which are being launched at an increasing rate, are designed for multiple education levels and populations. Machine learning (ML) is an…

Programming is an essential part of the curriculum of computer science non-major students. The motivation for the various elements of interdisciplinary degrees is often very low in computer science, which faces a gender gap as well. Differences between study courses and gender in confidence, attitude, student numbers, and motivation in computer…

Background and Context: Flipped classrooms are becoming more widely adopted across engineering higher education contexts. In degree programs where enrollment is increasing and undergraduate curricula are packed with content, pedagogies that allow more time for actively participate in classroom activities are being highly sought after to aid in…

While learner-centeredness is important to quantify, education researchers disagree on how best to measure it. The overall aim of this research was to measure the learner-centeredness of introductory biology classrooms with a valid and reliable instrument that offers a different perspective than self-reported faculty surveys or expert observation…

The United States produces too few Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) graduates to meet demand. We investigated scientific reasoning ability as a possible factor in STEM retention. To do this, we classified students in introductory biology courses at a large private university as either declared STEM or non-STEM majors and…

Students' learning experiences in an introductory statistics course for non-math majors are compared between two different instructional approaches under controlled conditions. Two sections of the course (n = 52) are taught using a flipped classroom approach and one section (n = 30) is taught using a traditional lecture approach. All sections are…

As part of an effort to improve students' knowledge of constellations and bright stars in an introductory level descriptive astronomy survey course, we measured the baseline knowledge that students bring to the class and how their score evolve over the course of the semester. This baseline is needed by the broader astronomy education research…

Studying physics for nonphysics majors at college level is usually a process of learning new problem-solving skills and sometimes seems a frustrating experience. In an attempt to provide students with more learning resources, online homework was required to supplement the instruction. This study reveals the role of the online homework assignments…

While online and face-to-face (F2F) courses have been compared in numerous studies, there has been a lack of focus on online chemistry courses. This study was conducted to compare the success of students instructed in an online or F2F general chemistry course for non-majors. One hundred forty six exam questions were categorized according to…

We implemented peer instruction in an introductory level conceptual physics course for nonscience majors on the basis of the success others reported with this method. We expected to see that learning from peer conversation, as evidenced by answering conceptual questions correctly following discussion, would correlate with course grade, but we did…

One critical tool for creating an environmentally literate citizenry is to reach students other than those in environmental-related majors in the form of the university-level large introductory environmental studies course. In this study, we relate student academic background to initial and final environmental awareness results. We found that…

Traditional lectures have come under increasing criticism as research indicates lectures may be less effective in achieving learning outcomes than other teaching methods. Student engagement and success can potentially be improved by changing traditional lectures to instructional methods using active learning techniques. Active learning refers to…

Our study explored the prospects and limitations of using machine-learning software to score introductory biology students' written explanations of evolutionary change. We investigated three research questions: 1) Do scoring models built using student responses at one university function effectively at another university? 2) How many human-scored…