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…

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) constitute a valuable and economical teaching force in many higher education undergraduate programmes. However, student satisfaction with their teaching has attracted little attention in the research literature. This study aimed at examining students' evaluation of teaching of GTAs in discussion groups, as well…

The authors investigated whether undergraduates attending an American West Coast public university who were not U.S. citizens (nondomestic) maximized their grade point averages (GPA) through their choice of major field. Multiple regression hierarchical linear modeling analyses showed that major field's effect size was small for these…

This study examined the factors that contribute to students' success in conducting geological field work. Undergraduate students (n = 49; 51% female; mean age = 22 y) who were enrolled in the 5-wk State University of New York at Oswego (SUNY Oswego) geology field program volunteered to participate in this study. At the beginning of the field…

Attitudes toward science are an important aspect of students' persistence in school science and interest in pursuing future science careers, but students' attitudes typically decline over the course of formal schooling. This study examines relationships of students' attitudes toward science with their perceptions of science as inclusive or…

This paper draws from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience to develop a preliminary similarity-choice theory of how people allocate attention among information patches on webpages while completing search tasks in complex informational websites. Study 1 applied stepwise multiple regression to a large dataset and showed that success rate…

The present study investigated the effects of providing subtitles and taking enotes on cognitive load and performance. A total of 73 English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) undergraduates learned brain anatomy and cognitive functions through multimedia programs. We used a 2 (subtitle/no) x 2 (taking enotes/no) factorial design to test the following:…

The 6-yr degree-completion rate of undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors at U.S. colleges and universities is less than 40%. Persistence among women and underrepresented minorities (URMs), including African-American, Latino/a, Native American, and Pacific Islander students, is even more troubling, as these…

Undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory biology course for nonmajors during the fall semester of 2007 were administered the Biology Attitude Scale (Russell and Hollander 1975), a constructed Mathematics Attitude Scale, and a portion of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich and Smith 1993). Together, the…

The introductory management science (MS) course has historically been recognized as one of the most difficult core courses in the business school curriculum. This study uses multiple regression to examine the factors that contribute to the success of undergraduate business students in an MS course, based on data gathered from the college…