Resonance is a fundamental concept that is necessary for students' successful learning in organic chemistry. However, there is a need to know more about both (1) what students find important when describing resonance and (2) students' conceptual understanding. This research seeks to address this discrepancy by examining second-semester organic…

This study investigates (1) the impact of structuring versus reflection-provoking support on university students' adoption of socially shared metacognitive regulation (SSMR) during face-to-face peer tutoring (PT) and (2) the relation between SSMR and group performance. A quasi-experimental design was adopted, involving 72 educational sciences…

Finding a way to impress upon students how they directly connect to others around the world is a challenge. What they had for dinner, how they paid for their gasoline, and where they disposed of their Starbucks cup all provide fodder to help students see direct connections between their actions and the world around them. Consumption logs track…

Students studying political science, public administration, public service, and related fields are increasingly expected to engage with local communities in their eventual careers. Providing curriculum-based opportunities for such engagement, however, can be challenging. Are the costs worth the benefits? In 2016, faculty from two universities in…

There is increasing literary evidence for the design of robust formative feedback in higher education. Translation of theoretical models into practice is still evolving and much of the available evidence is based on participant perceptions rather than quantitative changes in learning outcome. Students are often dissatisfied with standard modes of…

We conducted a survey of about ten different pedagogical tools with students of seven different small undergraduate business classes with average class size of 27 students. We propose that the higher the students' agreement with specific pedagogical methods the higher their motivation as well as their learning outcomes. A statistical significance…

Challenges to the value of active civic engagement are an increasingly common phenomenon in introductory American government courses as there is a rise in populist sentiment and a lethargic democratic public. Traditional methods of civic participation and ideal citizenship are difficult to model and teach against this backdrop. Here, we offer…

Almost all finite groups encountered by undergraduates can be represented as multiplicative groups of concise block-diagonal binary matrices. Such representations provide simple examples for beginning a group theory course. More importantly, these representations provide concrete models for "abstract" concepts. We describe Maple lab…

Peer learning has become a central feature in many postsecondary classrooms. Many peer learning activities feature near-peer instructors who had previously completed the course and who later serve as peer leaders. There are relatively few examples of activities in which students in a course act as true peer instructors for their classmates. One…

In addition to stimulating interest through experiential means, educators can support interest development through structured reflection. Our randomized controlled intervention study assessed the effectiveness of 10-minute written utility-value reflections designed to enhance the interest of introductory animal science students. During the Spring…

In previous studies, scholars have noted that challenges experienced by international students have an impact on their academic success. However, limited research has been conducted on how international students overcome the challenges they face in non-Western countries, such as Malaysia. This paper aims to fills this gap by investigating…

Adult refugees often turn to informal learning opportunities, such as family literacy programs, to learn English. These programs often promote dominant, neoliberal ideologies and invoke a deficit lens that intends to fix newcomers. This chapter looks at the learning experiences of Kurdish refugees who participated in a family literacy program in…

I have always valued reflection highly -- as a means of developing as a writer and as a life practice -- but I have been disappointed by the lack of thought resembling reflection when asking students to write about their writing practices. This dissertation presents the results of a grounded theory study of student reflective assignments through a…

This study explores the pedagogical effectiveness of assignments developed for a first-year composition course to encourage reflexive reading habits that can aid students in the writing process. Students in this course were asked to articulate the connections they found between multimodal texts of their own choosing and texts assigned by their…

Over the last several years, National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) has worked with faculty from around the country to build an online library of assignments that both foster and provide evidence of student learning. The Library is now approaching 80 entries and growing. A number of those assignments include an explicit…