In "Making Sense of Sensemaking," readers will learn how to navigate the journey from traditional teaching to a dynamic, student-centered approach that emphasizes understanding over rote learning. Grounded in the latest educational research and aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), this book provides practical…

Teaching chemistry to nonscience majors is challenging because most students come to class with negative beliefs about chemistry. Those mindsets stem from their inaccurate prior knowledge of how chemistry relates to their daily lives. To address the issues and promote students' engagement in chemistry courses, we implemented ubiquitous biodiesel…

This research presents the investigation of physics students' and physics faculty members' professional development and a design methodology via which we could best support them in their professional development. In particular, the first part of this dissertation will focus on undergraduate upper-division physics students' conceptual learning and…

Despite its value in higher education, academic rigor is a challenging construct to define for instructor and students alike. How do students perceive academic rigor in their biology course work? Using qualitative surveys, we asked students to identify "easy" or "hard" courses and define which aspects of these learning…