The Twilight School at Danbury High School in Connecticut helps students who are in danger of failing their freshman year to get back on track. In its first year, the program offered special credit-bearing after-school courses in biology and English to students who failed those classes in their first semester. The smaller class sizes and informal…

Introducing group work in college science classrooms can lead to noticeable gains in student achievement, reasoning ability, and motivation. To realize these gains, students must all contribute. Strategies like assigning roles, group contracts, anonymous peer evaluations, and peer ratings all encourage student participation. In a class using these…

Background/Context: Students, classrooms, teachers, and schools form hierarchical units of any schooling system that compete for, say, educational resources and sometimes blame one another for the failure to meet a certain societal goal. Little educational research exists that separates competing effects on schooling outcomes across these…

The purpose of the research was to compare the effects of two different techniques of the cooperative learning approach, namely Team-Game Tournament and Jigsaw, on undergraduates' conceptual understanding in a Hormone Biochemistry course. Undergraduates were randomly assigned to Group 1 (N = 23) and Group 2 (N = 29). Instructions were accomplished…

Given the globalization of science education and the different cultures between China and Germany, we tried to compare and explain the differences on teacher questions and real life instances in biology lessons between the two countries from a culture-related perspective. 22 biology teachers from China and 21 biology teachers from Germany…

The present study aims to empiricaly demonstrate the viability and benefits of an awareness-based approach to diversify knowledge between potential learning partners. Groups of four learners studied lesson material on biology. After a knowledge test, the groups were to form collaborative learning dyads. Based on the test, a novel knowledge…

The purpose of this study explored alternative teaching methods to improve student outcomes in the classroom. The researcher investigated the effects of the active learning strategies, Process Oriented Guided Inquiry learning and Peer Instruction on student achievement, conceptual understanding, and students' self-efficacy in an honors biology…

Title IX Coordinators are educational administrators who play a critical role in providing campus environments free of sex discrimination, harassment, and violence. Their work is demanding, highly regulated, and set in an increasingly volatile political context. There is little research on the experiences of these administrators. Utilizing the…

In this work we use prior to tutor-session data to generate an individualized student knowledge model. Intelligent learning environments use student models to individualize curriculum sequencing and help messages. Researchers decompose the learning tasks into sets of Knowledge Components (KCs) that represent individual units of knowledge; the…

This work reports a classroom experience of a general physics course designed to foster also the initiation of preservice mathematics and biology teachers to physics pedagogical content knowledge. To modify the conceptions that these students have about teaching and learning, the course was taught using different active learning instructional…

Assessment of student learning is crucial to capture accurately student understanding of core concepts and competencies as well as to provide relevant feedback for informing teaching and learning. Yet, many instructors in two-year and four-year undergraduate institutions rarely have pedagogical training to design fair instruction and assessments.…

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in…

Metacognitive ability is enormously important for improving students' learning performance. However, overconfidence bias may hinder students' metacognition abilities. Therefore, in this study, we conducted an intervention to reduce or debias overconfidence among students using the KAAR (knowledge, awareness, action, and reflection) model. Ninety…

Organizational climate, that is, the atmosphere surrounding an organization, unites features with individual, organizational, and environmental characteristics that affect the behaviors of individuals within the organization. Burnout is accepted as a syndrome that often occurs in people who work together with others. Faculty members in…

Problem-based learning via virtual exchange affords opportunities for students to learn biology while developing abilities to learn about and work with diverse others. We describe an activity using these methods, with goals for students to develop useful cell structure analogies, analyze how analogies are not perfect representations of target…