Collaborative two-stage exams provide an effective mechanism to incorporate group work into summative course assessments. We implemented these exams in an upper-level biology laboratory course over two terms, one with online exams and one with in-person exams. We compared student exam performance and perceptions of two-stage exams and group work…

Students enter classrooms equipped with a rich foundation of skills and knowledge from their everyday experiences. High-quality science education builds on students' wealth of experience in making sense of the world. In science classrooms, "sensemaking" is a collaborative practice that includes students sharing initial ideas with peers…

As student populations in the United States grow increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse, asset-oriented pedagogical approaches become essential for leveraging the linguistic talents of multilingual students in science education. This literature review explores evidence-based instructional interventions supporting emergent multilingual…

This paper explores the effect of a paired lab course on students' course outcomes in nonmajors introductory biology at the University of Alaska Anchorage. We compare course completion and final grades for 10,793 students (3736 who simultaneously enrolled in the lab and 7057 who did not). Unconditionally, students who self-select into the lab are…

The purpose of this study was to examine how small groups of students in an introductory undergraduate chemistry course construct CERs and the influence of race, gender, and perceived status during this construction. The small groups of students engaged in three chemistry activities that required them to generate a claim, evidence, and reasoning…

In teaching newcomer students, educators must envision how to provide opportunities for language use and development through age-appropriate content instruction. This article describes a design research study, in which we developed and piloted 5th grade science units and studied the participation of two newcomer students in sense-making…

Robust evidence shows that Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) improves the academic success of first-year college students in introductory Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses. Less clear is the extent to which this positive PLTL effect varies across different subgroups of the population. The current study aims to deepen our…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of different metacognitive interventions on knowledge and regulation of cognition, as well as academic performance (i.e., exam and final grades) in three sections of an undergraduate human anatomy and physiology course. All targeted classes were randomly assigned to one of three groups…

This study deals with the implementation of a web-based collaborative inquiry (WISE) project in secondary science education and unravels the contribution and challenges of this learning approach to foster students' motivation to learn science, and its relation with student and class-level characteristics. An empirical mixed methods study in 13…

The novelty of this study is rooted in the uniqueness of its setting: Informal, in school, Mini Science Museum that is managed by high school students who also develop teaching materials and guide the visitors. The phenomenological study presented here followed, over a period of 9 months, a group of 11 students that served as the museum's…

This study investigated exam achievement and affective characteristics of students in general chemistry in a fully-randomized experimental design, contrasting Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) participation with a control group balanced for time-on-task and study activity. This study population included two independent first-semester courses with…

Even with recent advancements, education inequities in science remain for students with learning disabilities (SWLDs) and English learners (ELs), as evidenced through poor national assessment performance. When leveraged appropriately, educational technology provides a pathway for disadvantaged students to receive equal learning access. Project…

This study examined how a group of ten middle school teachers implemented a technology enriched problem-based learning (PBL) environment. The goal was to understand their motivation, document their implementation techniques, and identify factors that teachers considered important in using technology-based PBL tools in their teaching. The analysis…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

One hundred thirty-seven students in 12th grade physics classes participated in a quasi-experimental study comparing the jigsaw classroom method of cooperative instruction with traditional direct instruction. While no differences were found between the two conditions for physics achievement gains, the results revealed differences in students'…