The number of undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds enrolled in science and technology-related courses has increased over the past 20 years, but these students' persistence in STEM majors until graduation still lags behind the overall college population. Interventions like exposure to independent research, instruction using…

This dissertation focuses on three manuscripts all related to bolstering science achievement through recommendations from the National Research Council (NRC) regarding the teaching and learning of science. The manuscripts address meeting the NRC's call to incorporate curriculum and assessment that lead to more in-depth knowledge that can be…

Grades in introductory STEM courses can impact intrinsic motivation (IM) and self-efficacy (SE). We used an exploratory approach to examine trends in grades and how IM and SE impact students' grades. It is known that most first-generation (FG) college students are from underrepresented backgrounds (URM), and that these students are least likely to…

This study examines the often-heard assumption in science teaching that some pedagogies in science classrooms can serve a dual function--improve the student-perceived teacher quality and improve students' affinity to STEM professions. We asked 7507 freshmen from 40 colleges in the United States, selected in a stratified random procedure, to…

Whereas one of the potential uses of Socioscientific Issues-based instruction in basic education is to engage students in scientific practices, there is a lack of empirical evidence showing that this is indeed what happens in the classroom. On this basis, the present study analysed teachers' adaptations of pre-made SSI-based lessons in light of…

This research seeks to understand how secondary science students make space for themselves in the classroom. Specifically, this study examines the interplay between classroom structures and students' agentic negotiations while identifying the relationship between students' enacted agency and their authored science identities by drawing from a…

The purpose of this study is to investigate differences between women and men in chemistry, as reflected in their responses to a global gender gap survey. The survey was conducted in 2018; responses from 1,343 valid participants across the globe were collected and analyzed. The main results show that first, women were more likely to list their…

Boosting underrepresented student persistence in STEM majors has been of interest for several years. Prior research has explored various factors that may influence student success and persistence in STEM majors. Specifically, some of these studies have employed Yosso's community cultural wealth framework to explore how a student's cultural wealth…

While process simulation tools offer immense potential in chemical engineering, effectively integrating them into the educational curriculum poses challenges. This work explored and practiced online-offline blended teaching in process simulation courses. The design of this blended course was based on a comparison of students' performances in fully…

This study investigates the instructional practices of a chemistry professor during an immersion summer program, with a focus on employing multimodal discourse within a studio-based learning environment. For this study, multimodal discourse includes natural language, gestures, mathematical expressions, symbolic visual representations, and manual…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the stay-at-home order implemented by the New York State Governor, the introductory undergraduate biology courses were changed to an at-home remote learning modality. To provide conceptual learning and hands-on experience, the second semester introductory biology laboratory course utilised a multi-modal learning…

Fieldwork provides opportunities for students to develop employability-enhancing transferable skills as well as technical, discipline-specific skills and disciplinary knowledge. However, the extent to which staff purposely plan transferable skills outcomes of field courses, and, therefore, whether they are communicated to students is unknown. We…

Success in problem-based learning requires both strong information literacy to search for, evaluate, and use information effectively, and argumentation skills to generate coherent arguments. This study investigated the positive and negative effects of computer-based scaffolding to support high-school credit recovery students' information literacy…

Recognized as one of the most beautiful experiments of all time, the oil drop experiment performed by Robert Millikan and his graduate students (primarily Harvey Fletcher) is a standard in the repertoire of experiments performed by undergraduate physics students. However, "as a teaching lab it does not enjoy a good reputation for three…

Videos created with the hands of teachers filmed have been perceived as useful educational resource for students of Physics in undergraduate courses. In previous works, we analyzed the students' perception about educational videos by asking them about their experiences. In this work, we analyze the same facts, but from a learning analytics…