Spatial understanding of complex anatomical concepts is often a challenge for learners, as well as for educators. It is even more challenging for students with low mental spatial abilities. There are many options to teach spatial relationships, ranging from simple models to high-end three-dimensional (3D) virtual reality tools. Using a randomized…

A quasi-experimental treatment control group design was used to investigate the effect of a conceptual change curriculum, Multi-Step Inquiry approach, on students' perception of their learning in a science classroom. This started with the development of a workbook that explicitly focused on conceptual understanding, followed by the development and…

Background: The substantial growth in gamification research has connected gamified learning to enhanced engagement, improved performance, and greater motivation. Similar to gamification, personalized learning analytics dashboards can enhance student engagement. Objectives: This study explores the student experiences and academic achievements using…

This paper investigates what instructional factors influence conceptual understanding (CU) of signals and systems for senior undergraduate engineering students. Previous results show students in signals and systems courses typically gain little CU, though evidence-based instructional practices, such as active learning, can increase gains in CU.…

Duverger's Law--the principle that first-past-the-post systems tend to promote two major political parties while proportional representation systems tend to promote multipartism--is a commonly taught topic in introductory and some upper-level political science courses across subfields. However, it also contains concepts that are difficult for…

There has been much attention given to the use of technology in education; mostly concentrating on physical artifacts of technology to facilitate teaching delivery but little mentioning technology as a cultural resource to organize the learning environment promoting social interaction among students and between teacher and students. This paper…

Purpose: As online learning has become more prevalent, how learners interact with each other in those learning environments has become more salient. To develop effective levels of interaction, students must feel comfortable to express their ideas and views. For this reason, this paper aims to look at how individual students' levels of social…

The flipped classroom aims to improve learning by engaging students in educational activities outside of traditional lessons. Flipped classrooms have steadily gained popularity in the last decade and are a topic of discussion in teaching and learning forums. However, its adoption in mathematics and statistics has been subdued. Most higher…

This article explores the use of pre-recorded video mini-lectures to support and enhance traditional face-to-face lectures for undergraduate students. Mini-lectures guide students through key concepts so that they can understand and assimilate key content before attending lectures.

Promoting collaboration and discourse in asynchronous online courses is challenging; students need something engaging to talk about, a communications medium in which to fluidly discuss it, and a social environment that supports discourse. We designed a fully online introductory geoscience lecture and lab course called Geology Goes Hollywood that…

Our students are not a tabula rasa in classes. These varied learners imbibe new information in relevance to others and reaffirm their own concepts. Quite often, in this journey of forming new connections, inadvertently, misconceptions are retained and may be reinforced if not corrected early. Students come to learning situations with preconceived…

We examine pre-service teachers' theoretical learning during one five-week training module, and their educators' learning about better lecture design to foster student learning. The study is iterative: interventions (one per group) were implemented sequentially in student groups A-C, the results of the previous intervention serving as the baseline…

This paper focuses on the relationship between preferential teaching approach (PTA) and the concept of teachers' questioning practices (TQP), as part of a large-scale three-year project aimed at developing the scholarship of teaching and learning at one Portuguese university. In order to contribute to understandings of how teachers' questioning is…

A model of teaching/learning is proposed based on a "problem-based structure" of the contents of the course, in combination with a training in paper and pencil problem solving that emphasizes discussion and quantitative analysis, rather than formulae plug-in. The aim is to reverse the high failure and attrition rate among engineering…

Teaching competence is an important skill for graduate students to acquire and is often considered a precursor to an academic career. In this study, we evaluated the effects of a multi-day teaching workshop on graduate teaching philosophies by surveying 200 graduate students, 79 of whom had taken the workshops and 121 who had not. We found no…