Homework has been shown to provide positive impacts on student performance at the undergraduate level. Providing an incentive for students to complete homework assignments, however, can be challenging and result in grade inflation or promotion of a mentality where students attempt to collect points rather than use these assignments for feedback…

An undergraduate online course on Applied Biochemistry and Molecular Biology was developed through different formats of case study that included lecture, class discussion, small-groups discussion, and individual work. Cases covering health, biotechnology, agriculture, and other issues were developed or adapted from the literature to reach the…

Formative assessments (FA), which can occur in or out of class, are a way for students to demonstrate their understanding of the material, to see progress, and to receive feedback from instructors related to their learning process. Examples of in-class FAs include clicker questions with peer discussion, while homework assignments are an example of…

Peer assessment has great potential to improve student learning. However, assessment is not an everyday activity for students, and thus providing appropriate guidance to students is a key component of creating a successful peer assessment experience. This paper explores how to structure peer feedback in the guided process Peer-Assisted Reflection…

This article focuses on learning gains in the area of higher education STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) through new approaches to the formative assessment feedback cycle. Learning gains were examined for stratified randomized comparison and two treatment groups of 943 students organized into 41 laboratory sections in…

Homework in introductory physics represents an important part of a student's learning experience; therefore, choosing the manner in which homework is presented merits investigation. We performed three rounds of clinical trials comparing the effects of mastery-style homework vs. traditional-style homework with students in both algebra-based and…

We investigated whether use of an adaptive-responsive online homework system (OHS) that tailors homework to students' prior knowledge and periodically reassesses students to promote learning through practice retrieval has inherent advantages over traditional-responsive online homework. A quasi-experimental cohort control post-test-only design with…

Use of online homework as a formative assessment tool for organic chemistry coursework was examined. Student perceptions of online homework in terms of (i) its ranking relative to other course aspects, (ii) their learning of organic chemistry, and (iii) whether it improved their study habits and how students used it as a learning tool were…