Structural questions about the undergraduate political science major have spurred debates in the field for more than thirty years. Today, resurgent growth of unusually sharp threats to American democracy fuel familiar curricular questions with new urgency. However, the combined effects of inertia, bureaucratic hurdles, and resource constraints…

The fields of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have seen massive growth in recent years. Numerous degree programs have started to redesign their curricula to meet the high market demand for people qualified to fill related job positions. In this paper, the authors perform a content analysis of online job postings hosted on…

Background: Critical thinking is an important student learning outcome in all psychology courses and included in the American Psychological Association's (APA's) goals for the undergraduate major. Objective: The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of integrating a general model of critical thinking into the instruction,…

As Latin American countries moved from military dictatorship to civilian government in the 1980s, a burning issue was how to deal with the massive repression and grave human rights violations of the recent past. Should there be an effort to hold perpetrators accountable, or simply "turn the page?" This article documents and analyzes the…

This pilot study explored the linguistic attitudes, knowledge, and beliefs of undergraduate majors in speech-language pathology (SLP) and the role an interest in linguistics played in their choice of the SLP major. Fifteen undergraduate students declared as SLP majors participated in this mixed-methods study. Participants responded to a survey and…

We leverage variation in the timing of women's colleges' transitions to coeducation throughout the 1960s-2000s to study how exposure to a gendered social environment affects women's human capital investments. Applying event study and synthetic control analyses to newly collected historical data, we find that the share of women majoring in STEM at…

This paper reports how high failure rates in the first quantitative course that college business majors take were significantly reduced by implementing course-embedded remediation. More specifically, this paper details our process for identifying students at risk, placing them in special sections of the first quantitative course, and adding an…

Understanding social interactions among students comprises a rich area of physics education research. Here we focus on the social interactions in introductory physics laboratories (labs). Most existing research in such contexts focuses on within-group social dynamics, however, we argue that interactions between different lab groups are just as…

The authors outline a new approach to introductory political science courses limited exclusively to political science majors that focuses on democratic development and its intersection with conceptions of "res publica." The course is innovative in that it is for political science majors only, is team-taught, eschews traditional…

This dissertation examines the impact of state educational programs on the economics of education and labor, focusing on the New York State (NYS) STEM Incentive Program and China's tuition-free policy for vocational secondary education (VSE). The first two Chapters analyze the effects of the NYS STEM Incentive Program, an initiative implemented in…

Enactment of the "Rehabilitation Act of 1973" and the "Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990" expanded and clarified the rights of students with disabilities in higher education (Connor, 2011; Pena, 2014; Troiano, 2003). In the past three decades, the enrollment rate of students with learning disabilities (LD) in higher…

In a small physics department it can be difficult to develop and maintain an environment that engages students of all levels, and encourages and facilitates student growth in curricular and co-curricular experiences. This difficulty can be amplified when the number of physics majors is small, especially with fewer than 15-20 majors in the program.…

Three years ago our mathematics department rearranged the topics in second and third semester calculus, moving multivariable calculus to the second semester and series to the third semester. This paper describes the new arrangement of topics, and how it could be adapted to calculus curricula at different schools. It also explains the benefits we…

The article's authors report on a comprehensive curricular reform aimed at communicating the broad range of social issues that economists study while engaging students in active learning strategies. The reform increased interest in taking additional economics courses and majoring in economics, broadened students' views of what economists do, and…

Engaging in interactions with peers is important for student learning. Many studies have quantified patterns of student interactions in in-person physics courses using social network analysis, finding different network structures between instructional contexts (lecture and laboratory) and styles (active and traditional). Such studies also find…