People's ability to evaluate scientific research is important to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. STEM educators can use the pandemic to frame instruction of scientific literacy and critical-thinking skills. In a small pilot introductory psychology course taught online in spring 2021, we created jigsaw-style modules organized around real-world…

The capstone course for many Earth Science programs is a field course. To increase accessibility and to create a substitute in light of the cancellation of in-person courses due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed an online introductory field geology course. The course consisted of six different modules. The first was a virtual reality room,…

Unearthing the perspectives students bring with them in their college-level education coursework is especially important as education instructors are tasked with interrupting the unexamined proliferation of dominant ideologies among future educational professionals. The introduction to education course serves as an important site for this…

In this paper the authors present a unique approach to teaching introductory statistics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The approach uses a feature in Excel called "spinners" to dynamically adjust key variables, such as sample size, confidence levels, and probabilities, among others, to enable an expanded discussion of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the process of building a model that identifies criteria that determine the quality of virtual postgraduate programs. In the Colombian context, there are no national criteria/standards to evaluate the quality of this type of program. This proposed model is implemented in a public university that has…

Responding to Donato and Brooks's (2004) call for undergraduate students to have more opportunities to engage in discourse at the advanced proficiency level, collaborative dialogues provide students with a situation conducive to language production and learning (Swain, 1997). As most of the research on collaborative dialogues has focused on the…

Firms desire graduates capable of executing current and future business practices, many of which revolve around data. To meet those needs, we shifted the orientation of our required information systems course from technology to data. Instead of a survey of information systems, students learn the data acquisition-preparation-mining-presentation…

With the development of instructional design literature and the potential of online courses to support learning, there exists a gap between theoretical knowledge (theory) and practice (reality). The objective of this study is to determine the effectiveness of the design of online courses for teaching and learning, and what designers and…

Along with a global mobility of NNESTs around the world (Canagarajah, 1999), there has been an expanding population of NNEST trainees in the U.S. higher education institutions (Park, 2012). This brought an assumption that there will be an increasing number of international college composition teachers in the U.S. college contexts (Ruecker et al.,…

The use of computational scaffolding is a crucial strategy to foster students' regulation of learning skills, which is associated with increased learning achievement. However, most interventions treat the regulatory processes as individual actions isolated from a social context. This view contradicts the most recent research that points to the…

In psychology programs, students should acquire both domain-specific knowledge and cross-domain competences important for later practice (e.g., multiple document literacy). Typically, such competences are trained "directly" in courses explicitly devoted to them or indirectly in courses on psychological topics that require them without…

In the spring of 2021, the Community College System in which the author works was in the middle of a planned three-year pilot of math and English self-placement ("Direct Enrollment") procedures. Concerns about the significant English language learner (ELL) population at one institution led to the development of a corequisite support…

Following the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in March 2020, distance learning has gained more attention from national and international education policies. This timely paper aimed to review the literature about digital competencies that K-12 and pre-service teachers require in order to succeed in supporting online learners during and post COVID-19. A…

Research on the STEM educational pipeline has focused on degree attainment, finding that students who take STEM courses in high school are more likely to declare a STEM major later on (Gottfried & Bozick, "Education Finance and Policy" 11:177-202, 2016) and tend to perform better in college (Sadler & Tai, "Science…

Understanding statistics is essential for engineers. However, statistics courses remain challenging for many students, as they find them rigid, abstract, and demanding. Prior research has indicated that using project-based learning (PjBL) to demonstrate the relevance of statistics to students can have a significant effect on learning in these…