Teaching sexual and gender minority (SGM) health in undergraduate medical education has become a priority. We have authored and evaluated an infographic to introduce first-year students to SGM health, identity, and clinical communication skills. A realist and constructivist qualitative design employed audio-recorded and transcribed student focus…

In 2014, evolution through natural selection was introduced to the primary science National Curriculum in England for year 6 (ages 10-11). As teachers had little prior experience of teaching this concept, it provided a rare opportunity to study the effectiveness of different approaches. A study was developed to investigate the impact of…

Pedagogical practices that are effective in content courses are often effective in CLIL courses too, yet one such practice -- content compression -- is generally neglected. Content compression is the purposeful reduction of the content to be taught; however, the CLIL literature often warns against the reduction and simplification of content for…

Curriculum is a representation of the ideas that drive music teachers' decisions in their planning and instruction. Yet some components of curriculum are never written down but are prevalent in a music teacher's instruction; these components are often called the null or hidden curricula. This article considers what these curricula are, how they…

This dissertation explores contemplative practices such as mindfulness, meditation, compassionate listening, and journaling as a means to self-awareness, self-compassion, and empathy for self and others. Women's and Gender Studies (WGS) and social justice classrooms and pedagogy include difficult conversations on social justice topics such as…

Black women are severely underrepresented in faculty careers. To begin moving towards action in eradicating the policies and practices used against Black women to keep them from successfully obtaining faculty roles, we must first look to challenges and opportunities faced during doctoral training that negatively impact the faculty pipeline. As…

College students are frequently unprepared for the rigor involved in reading college-level materials. The purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental study was to analyze students' reading performance in contextualized and decontextualized reading courses over the period of one semester in a community college setting to determine the impact…

The intricacies that negotiate human sexuality and sex-negativity customary in school-based sexuality education programs in the United States contribute to sex-negative notions that inform current models of sexuality education as heteronormative and cisnormative, which assumes all students are heterosexual and cisgender. This fact essentially…

This dissertation undertakes the question, "what are the implications of engaging climate crisis in social studies education?" Employing the theoretical notion of difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998; Pitt & Britzman, 2003), the analysis of data attends to the multitude of challenges teachers face as they grapple with the content of…

Background: Engineering culture research to date has described the culture as rigid, chilly, and posing many barriers to entry. However, the COVID-19 pandemic provided an important opportunity to explore how engineering culture responds to a major disruption. Purpose: The purposes of this study are to understand how elements of engineering culture…

The present study investigated the extent to which monitoring practice and timely monitoring feedback, contextualized in an online undergraduate biology course, improved students' metacognitive monitoring and learning outcomes. The intervention followed a true experimental design and randomly assigned 162 students into three conditions: a control…

This article details the 'Decolonisation as Co-Creation' project, a co-created-with-students approach to decolonisation of a reading list to be used on a specific final year, undergraduate module. This contributes to the overall decolonisation of Aston University through the development of academic outputs and a methodology for approaching the…

Background: Extensive research on massive open online courses (MOOCs) has focused on analysing learners' behavioural trace data to understand navigation and activity patterns, which are known to vary systematically across geo-cultural contexts. However, the perception of learners regarding the role of different learning design elements in…

The aim of this dissertation was to develop and validate a novel Epistemic Competence Beliefs Measure (ECBM) in order to explore students' ability to evaluate the characteristics of scenarios about complex and controversial social issues. Epistemic competence was hypothesized to be critical in performing multiple source use (MSU) tasks and in the…

In this essay, we consider how reconstructing our ideas about the nature of democracy, and its relationship to education, can help us respond to contemporary challenges. We focus specifically on the ongoing fights about critical race theory (CRT), providing an overview of the CRT controversy--we argue that its cultivation for political reasons has…