Advances in, and dissemination of, computer technologies in the field of drug research now enable the use of molecular modeling tools to teach important concepts of drug design to chemistry and pharmacy students. A series of computer laboratories is described to introduce undergraduate students to commonly adopted "in silico" drug design…

Tuning is a faculty-driven initiative designed to improve the quality of higher education by establishing transparent and fully assessable learning outcomes and proficiencies for degrees, discipline by discipline. Unlike many other initiatives in the United States which function within an individual institution, the Utah Tuning Project involved…

Different approaches to the use of "clickers" (also known as student response systems) were introduced to a cohort of 127 students over a two-year period with the aim of making students think more deeply in-class about their chemistry knowledge. Student performance was monitored, and individual, anonymous student feedback was frequently…

As discipline-based astronomy education researchers become more interested in experimentally testing innovative teaching strategies to enhance learning in undergraduate introductory astronomy survey courses ("ASTRO 101"), scholars are placing increased attention toward better understanding factors impacting student gain scores on the…

The purpose of this study was to describe and explain undergraduate students' positions of teaching and assisting students with disabilities during adapted aquatics practicum experiences. The participants were eight kinesiology students who enrolled in an introductory adapted physical education (APE) course at a public university in the Midwest…

This research was aimed at developing printed teaching materials of Atomic Physics PEFI4421 Course using Research and Development (R & D) model; which consisted of three major set of activities. The first set consisted of seven stages, the second set consisted of one stage, and the third set consisted of seven stages. This research study was…

Previous research on problem diagrams suggested that including a supportive diagram, one that does not provide necessary problem solving information, may bring little, or even negative, benefit to students' problem solving success. We tested the usefulness of problem diagrams on 12 different physics problems (6A/B experiments) in our massive open…

Despite the ubiquity of prerequisites in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics curricula, there has been minimal effort to assess their value in a data-driven manner. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we examined the impact of prerequisites in the context of a microbiology lecture and lab course pairing.…

National calls to improve student academic success in college have sparked the development of bridge programs designed to help students transition from high school to college. We designed a 2-week Summer Bridge program that taught introductory biology content in an active-learning way. Through a set of exploratory interviews, we unexpectedly…

The seminal report "Vision and Change" outlined improvements necessary for undergraduate biology courses to accomplish widely recognized learning objectives. Over the past 8 years, we have developed a two-semester introductory biology course that incorporates the core concepts and competencies recommended in "Vision and…

Researchers, instructors, and funding bodies in biology education are unanimous about the importance of developing students' competence in experimental design. Despite this, only limited measures are available for assessing such competence development, especially in the areas of molecular and cellular biology. Also, existing assessments do not…

Nationally, many public universities have started to move into the online course and program market that is most often associated with for-profit institutions of higher education. Administrators in public universities make statements regarding benefits to students' desire for flexibility and profit margins related to online courses. But do…

We propose an integrated curriculum to establish essential abilities of computer programming for the freshmen of a physics department. The implementation of the graphical-based interfaces from Scratch to LabVIEW then to LabVIEW for Arduino in the curriculum "Computer-Assisted Instrumentation in the Design of Physics Laboratories" brings…

Although spatial reasoning and penetrative thinking skills are essential for many disciplines, these concepts are difficult for students to comprehend. In microscopy, traditional educational materials (i.e., photographs) are static. Conversely, video-based training methods convey dimensionality. We implemented a real-time digital video imaging…

Multimedia instruction has been shown to serve as an effective learning aid for chemistry students. In this study, the viability of student-generated video instruction for organic chemistry laboratory techniques and procedure was examined and its effectiveness compared to instruction provided by a teaching assistant (TA) was evaluated. After…