Scientific and technological initiation programs are developed to introduce students to scientific research and technological development. We use the term undergraduate research (UR) to refer to both initiation modalities. Our study aimed to evaluate undergraduate students' research experience, self-perceptions, and scientific production during…

Value-directed remembering refers to the tendency to best remember important information at the expense of less valuable information, and this ability may draw on strategic attentional processes. In six experiments, we investigated the role of attention in value-directed remembering by examining memory for important information under conditions of…

This study discusses the findings of a survey designed to capture students' allocations of credibility to online materials resembling social media posts. The survey respondents were 1,019 undergraduate students at a medium-sized Canadian university. The students came from a range of programs and years of study in those programs. The survey…

This study aimed to explore undergraduates' perceptions of relevance in conjunction with two associated constructs, personal interest, and task value. To unearth these perceptions, American (n = 104) and Dutch (n = 79) students completed the Conceptualization of Relevance Task (CoRT). This task required them to: (a) select a graphic that best…

How do people determine whether a conversation is good or bad? Do conversational phenomena (reaching common ground, striving to contribute equally, successful conversational closings) influence judgments of conversation quality and recall of conversations? We tested whether individuals reading previously transcribed conversations considered…

The current study examined the effect of combining a utility value intervention with task relevance instructions on utility value, recall, and reading time. A utility value intervention is an activity that assists students in making relevance connections between course content and their lives, while task relevance instructions are pre-reading cues…

The authors examine the perceptions of undergraduate students with business majors to determine the leadership competencies they most value. Prior research examined business major rankings in a smaller private school. This research examined the generalizability of those findings by surveying 667 students from a regional public college in the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine curricular innovation in accounting using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and t-test to measure the effects of transformative sustainability education in accounting on the attitudes of male and female undergraduate accounting students at a public university in the southwestern USA toward…

Interest has been globally established as a powerful predictor that triggers engagement, especially in fostering physical culture among students. Scholarly works in PE have already shown that situational interest triggers individual interest, which can lead to highly engaged students. However, little is known about the impact of individual…

Universities are increasingly incorporating flipped learning as an effective instructional approach. Given the popularity of flipped learning, numerous studies have examined the psychological aspects of students and learning achievement in flipped learning classes. However, little research has examined the social influence processes of students in…

This study examines survey data from 2127 undergraduate women at the 2015 and 2019 American Physical Society Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) in order to classify what led them to study physics. We use expectancy-value and self-efficacy theory to create a coding framework based on different types of value and efficacy…

In this paper, we present a qualitative study on what values students perceive in their abstract algebra course. We interviewed six undergraduates early in their abstract algebra course and then again after their course was completed about what motivated them to learn abstract algebra and what value they saw in the subject. The key finding from…

Background: Utility-value (UV) classroom interventions typically involve students completing assignments that involve writing about the usefulness of the course material. They are widely recommended and have received some empirical support. Objective: This study tested the effectiveness of a UV intervention in an online research methods course. It…

Background: Previous research has indicated that it is difficult to maintain student motivation in gateway courses when students from multiple majors are taking the same course. Providing students with a choice in assignment is important because it creates a feeling that the students are in charge of their education, that they can tailor their…

As college degrees become more common and the cost of these degrees increases, so does the debate about the worthwhileness and value of a college education generally and of specific degrees in particular. Degrees in the humanities and liberal arts are particularly questioned, as data on starting salaries and unemployment rates are sometimes used…