Student perceptions on teaching and learning are investigated in a side-to-side comparison between traditional (closed, CER) non-free course materials and free open educational resources (OER). The primary resources being compared are textbook and automatically-graded web-based homework systems. The results are based on a 32 item survey given to…

The rise of private tutoring globally has raised concerns over the hidden costs of "free" education systems and how these costs contribute to the persistence of inequality. We examine the drivers of tutoring at different levels of education in Egypt in an effort to understand why private tutoring has expanded despite policy efforts to…

How should a pedagogical agent in educational software be designed to support student learning? This question is complex seeing as there are many types of pedagogical agents and design features, and the effect on different student groups can vary. In this paper we explore the effects of designing a pedagogical agent's self-efficacy in order to see…

This study explored how research-based physics tutorials help students use argumentation in a small group-work activity. The participants were four first-year non-major physics students taking algebra-based introductory physics course in an urban university in the southeastern region of United States (US). The content analysis was conducted to…

This project assesses the ability of a game tutorial, "Goblin Threat" to increase university students' ability to recognize plagiarized passages. The game tutorial covers information about how to cite properly, types and consequences of plagiarism, and the differences between paraphrasing and plagiarism. The game involves finding and…

The facilitation of learning by tutors is a worldwide phenomenon that is supported by most open and distance learning (ODL) institutions. It is a strategy employed to achieve academic success. This qualitative intrinsic case study explored the views of tutors at the University of South Africa (Unisa) about the implementation of the Integrated…

As a means to encourage engagement in a large introductory organic chemistry class, students were tasked with the creation of digital tutorials for specific problems sourced from the assigned class textbook. Students had the freedom to choose how to produce their tutorials as long as the final product was a digital object suitable for sharing with…

"Is this solution pink enough?" is a persistent question when it comes to phenolphthalein-based titration experiments, one that budding, novice scientists often ask their instructors. Lab instructors usually answer the inquiry with remarks like, "Looks like you have overshot the end point", "Perhaps you should check the…

The purpose of this quantitative synthesis was to evaluate the effectiveness and related outcomes of the cross-age tutoring model when students with or at risk for emotional-behavioral disorders (EBD) serve as tutors. Research questions were posed to identify the shared and unique components (e.g., dosage, tutor training) of the cross-age tutoring…

Strategies for teaching NMR spectral interpretation in the undergraduate organic chemistry curriculum are often faculty-centered and can lead to student reliance on rote memorization and "guess and check" methods rather than critical-thinking skills for structure determination. This article describes a student-focused methodology for the…

A critical challenge for computer-based writing instruction is providing appropriate and adaptive practice. The current study examined three modes of computer-based writing practice with the goal of identifying those with the greatest learning and motivational value. High school students learned about writing strategies by studying lessons within…

Learning Support Services at the University of California, Santa Cruz is intended to aid students--particularly those who are at highest risk of academic failure--to master the required material and succeed in their courses. It includes two primary components: modified supplemental instruction (MSI) and tutoring. This study uses data from…

Formative feedback, aimed at helping students to improve their work, is an important factor in learning. Many tools that offer programming exercises provide automated feedback on student solutions. We have performed a systematic literature review to find out what kind of feedback is provided, which techniques are used to generate the feedback, how…

We developed generalizable affect detectors using 133,966 instances of 18 affective states collected from 69,174 students who interacted with an online math learning platform called Algebra Nation over the entire school year. To enable scalability and generalizability, we used generic interaction features (e.g., viewing a video, taking a quiz),…

In this paper, we applied a number of clustering algorithms on pretest data collected from 264 high-school students. Students took the pre-test at the beginning of a 5-week experiment in which they interacted with an intelligent tutoring system. The primary goal of this work is to identify clusters of students exhibiting similar knowledge…