Context is the background or the settings of an event or idea. It is only when events or ideas are considered within the context in which they occur that they can be fully understood. In education, the application of knowledge communicated in one context to a different one is a central feature of learning. However, knowledge transfer can be…

Nearly half of all U.S. students who declare science majors in college do not graduate with science degrees within six years. Improvements in science outcomes are linked with active-learning pedagogies such as Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). However, despite the need for education reform particularly in Alabama,…

Although many undergraduates begin college as STEM majors, attrition rates from the field are high and numerous reports suggest that evidence-based teaching methods are critical for retention. Despite educators' research and near consensus that active learning is more effective than lecture, there are many types of active learning and the…

Marine communities are experiencing rapid environmental changes including warming temperatures and ocean acidification (OA). For organisms within these communities, responses to ocean change are shaped by population- and community-level interactions which may modify their responses. This dissertation integrates experimental, field, and modeling…

With the outbreak of COVID-19, more online learning has been adopted for distance learning. However, the effectiveness of online learning for those students engaged in it for the first time has not been discussed. This study aims to investigate perceived ineffectiveness of online learning and its antecedents related to cognitive and affective…

With its distinct characteristics, the research article (hereafter RA) abstract has been a major area of interest within the field of metadiscourse. Investigating authorial presence displayed in RA abstracts can play an important role in illuminating the nature of the interaction among the writer, the text, and the reader. This study aimed to shed…

As online courses become increasingly common at the college level, an ongoing concern is how to ensure academic integrity in the online environment. One area that has received particular attention is that of preventing cheating during unproctored online exams. In this study, we examine students' behavior during unproctored exams taken in an online…

Students' understanding of the concepts that underlie evolution are often less than optimal and make it difficult for them to accept the theory of evolution. The aimed of this study were to: 1) map students' knowledge of Mutation and Recombination (M and R); and 2) analyze the effect of gender on their chairperson. This survey research involving…

Scientific reading and communication have become key components in postsecondary science education. However, undergraduates have often been found to lack motivation to engage in these tasks. The present study surveyed 2098 undergraduates and 27 biology faculty members to compare their views on the importance and time cost of eight practices in…

This study examined how a tropical climate (i.e. hot and wet climatic environment) and different language instructions, in French and in Creole, could affect imagery ability on French-Creole bilingual in the French West Indies. Participants were divided into two groups: Half of them completed the French Movement Imagery Questionnaire (MIQ-F), the…

Teacher burnout has become a prevalent issue in the public school system in the United States. Research about special education teacher burnout is lacking and virtually no research exists on how teachers of students with disabilities manage job-related stress. This exploratory study examines the perspectives of 18 teachers of students with…

Written scientific argumentation is a common practice among scientists, yet it is relatively absent from science K-12 classrooms (Applebee & Langer, 2013). However, recent research shows that opportunities to engage in collaborative discourse and argumentation provide students enhanced conceptual understanding and reasoning. Since one of the…

Games are fully accepted by students, as they stimulate memory, activate reasoning capacities in brain, improve the knowledge and keep out the stress. Our innovation teaching group is interested in using games for teaching Biochemistry of the Chemistry degree. Most of the individual games found in Internet are classified in numerical games…

In this era of pandemics, asylum seekers, and conflict between super powers, social sciences are a critical subject that can help develop young people who can not only recognise racial and social discrimination but also injustices at a regional, national, and global scale. Mainstream subjects, such as sociology, routinely support learning in the…

The field of biology education--and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines more broadly--has witnessed two major shifts in the past decade: (i) the increased awareness of research-based instructional strategies (RBIS) that are beneficial for student learning, and (ii) a recognition of the importance of computing…