This study explored incorporating immersive environments into the simulation-based training of paramedics to enhance engagement and improve work-readiness status by developing more authentic simulation scenarios. The training of paramedics must move past traditional practices and critically explore better ways to prepare paramedics to perform with…

Interest in virtual reality (VR) for teaching and learning in higher education is growing, given its many potential applications. VR offers a socially interactive environment with novel ways to engage students with materials, objects, and activities and provide students with experiences such as "field trips" that would be otherwise very…

Background: For randomized trials that use text as an outcome, traditional approaches for assessing treatment impact require each document first be manually coded for constructs of interest by trained human raters. These hand-coded scores are then used as a measured outcome for an impact analysis, with the average scores of the treatment group…

Background: Recent field experiments confirm that learning to teach under a more instructionally effective mentor causes teacher candidates to feel more prepared (Ronfeldt et al., 2020; Ronfeldt, Goldhaber, et al., 2018) and demonstrate more effective teaching (Goldhaber et al., 2022). One of these experiments--designed under a research-practice…

In this article, the authors will first make the case that, though humans is rife with division, evidence suggests that in fact, they are all pretty much the same, and that therefore there are grounds for perceiving the pursuit of a collective identity as genuinely legitimate. They will then explore the many factors that have helped to…

The construct of static and emergent shape thinking (Moore & Thompson, 2015) characterizes differences in students' reasoning about graphs. In our previous work with middle school students, we found that this construct may also be useful in characterizing students' reasoning about other representations such as simulations and tables. In this…

The use of technology in education has experienced a remarkable upswing in recent years, largely due to the integration of computer hardware into classrooms and the use of mobile devices such as smartphones. One aspect of this development is the proliferation of augmented reality (AR) in education, which has been shown to support teaching and…

Performing HPLC-based experiments in the undergraduate practical classroom is difficult because of the time required to perform an analysis. This limits the type of practical to one that undertakes a simple quantitative analysis. However, with the use of sophisticated simulators, such as the one employed in this exercise, more complex experiments…

It is crucial nowadays to predict in a fast and simple manner physical-chemical behaviors like, the size-dependent optical properties of gold nanospheres (Au NSs). The idea behind this experiment is trying to replace (as much as possible) robust and expensive microscopy techniques with UV-vis spectrophotometry and friendly simulations. Students…

Virtual reality (VR) has evolved to include non-immersive to fully-immersive experiences for the classroom. This study seeks to understand the potential effects VR may offer, specifically characteristics associated with how a student experiences a VR intervention and the effects of using a VR device for learning. A group experimental design was…

Prior work suggests that imagining helping others increases prosocial intentions and behavior toward those individuals. But is this true for everyone, or only for those who tend toward--or away from--helping more generally? The current study (N = 283) used an imagined helping paradigm and a battery of behavioral and self-report measures of trait…

Project management (PM) work readiness requires preparation beyond the knowledge of concepts and best practices to develop and practice soft skills needed for successful project management. This article proposes a methodology that combines real-world practitioner tools, PM processes, and a Microsoft Excel-based PM Simulator to create a…

The application of different virtual reality interventions has been recently gaining interest from researchers and practitioners. Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions increased the use of these technologies to help create much value for educators and students. The relationship between individual experience and…

Natural sciences can be difficult to grasp because physical and chemical phenomena can take place across time and length scales that are beyond the reach of human perception. This problem is particularly true for students attempting to learn about microfluidics, a discipline that involves intricate engineering methods and fluid phenomena that are…

This pretest/posttest experimental design study investigated the use of virtual reality to teach school counseling students empathy, as measured by the Empathy Quotient. An independent samples and paired-samples t-test were used to analyze students' scores in the experimental and control groups. The study's results are discussed.