Presented is a quantitative study on top-performing undergraduate science majors at a mid-size, master's large, public institution in the United States' South for the purpose of improving understanding of how motivation to learn science affects a student's decision to leave or remain in the sciences. The Science Motivation Questionnaire (SMQII)…

This study investigated the self-efficacy of first-year Chemistry students at a South African university. The research involved a quantitative survey of 333 students using the College Chemistry Self-Efficacy Scale (CCSS) developed by Uzuntiryaki and Capa Aydin (2009). Descriptive statistics on data for the CCSS scales suggested that students have…

Providing students with one-on-one interaction with instructors is a big challenge in large courses. One solution is to have students interact with their peers during class. Reciprocal peer tutoring (RPT) is a more involved interaction that requires peers to alternate the roles of "teacher" and "student." Theoretically,…

Mastering the ability to construct and manipulate Lewis structures is an important first step along the journey to reaching representational competence. Lewis structures serve as a convenient organizational scheme that can help students to scaffold their chemical knowledge and help them to apply it to predict a variety of physical and chemical…

This study describes the development and implementation of an iterative diagnostic and intervention routine designed to elicit and quantitatively describe aspects of student metacognition, affect, and study habits in a first-year undergraduate biology course. The Student Metacognition, Affect, and Study Habits (SMASH) inventory is a…

In chemistry, lack of academic preparation and math ability have been offered as explanations as to why women seem to enroll, perform, and graduate at lower levels than men. In this paper, we explore the alternative possibility that the gender gap in chemistry instead originates from differential gender effects of academic factors on students'…

The Achievement Goal Framework describes students' goal orientations as: task-based, focusing on the successful completion of the task; self-based, evaluating performance relative to one's own past performance; or other-based, evaluating performance relative to the performance of others. Goal orientations have been used to explain student success…

A central tenet of self-regulated learning theories is that students are motivated towards learning in order to self-regulate. It is thus important to identify student motivations in order to inform efforts to improve instructional strategies that encourage self-regulation. Here we describe a study aimed at characterizing the important motivation…

There is growing consensus regarding the effectiveness of active-learning pedagogies in college science courses. Less is known about ways that student-level factors contribute to positive outcomes in these contexts. The present study examines students' (N = 245) trust in the instructor--defined as perceptions of their instructor's understanding,…

The purpose of this study was to explore science content used during college students' negotiation of biology-based socioscientific issues (SSI) and examine how it related to students' conceptual understanding and acceptance of biological evolution. The Socioscientific Issues Questionnaire (SSI-Q) was developed to measure depth of evolutionary…

Physical chemistry I at Texas A&M University is an upper division course requiring mathematical and analytical skills. As such, this course poses a major problem for many Chemistry, Engineering, Biochemistry and Genetics majors. Comparisons between participants and non-participants in Supplemental Instruction for physical chemistry were made…

Two motivational factors--self-efficacy and interest--may be especially relevant to deepening students' understanding of astronomy. We examined the relationship between students' self-efficacy for, interest in learning about, and changes in their knowledge of stars, as measured by the Star Properties Concept Inventory (SPCI). Approximately 700…

Student success in chemistry is inherently tied to motivational and other affective processes. We investigated three distinct constructs tied to motivation: self-efficacy, interest, and effort beliefs. These variables were measured twice over the course of a semester in three sections of a first-semester general chemistry course (n = 170). We…

Despite the ubiquity of prerequisites in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics curricula, there has been minimal effort to assess their value in a data-driven manner. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we examined the impact of prerequisites in the context of a microbiology lecture and lab course pairing.…

This study investigated whether formative assessment is a predictor of summative assessment in a university first-year chemistry class. The sample comprised a total of 1687 first-year chemistry students chosen from the 2011 and 2012 cohorts. Both simple and multiple linear regression (SLR and MLR) techniques were applied to perform the primary aim…