Students' success in undergraduate STEM courses requires effective studying behavior, but also the motivation to enact it. Promoting students' achievement in STEM has commonly focused on either study strategies (cognitive) or motivational interventions; we hypothesized that combinations of these would be more effective. Using a Learning Management…

There is growing evidence that targeted instruction can improve diagram comprehension, yet one of the skills identified in the diagram comprehension literature--coordinating multiple representations--has rarely been directly taught to students and tested as a classroom intervention. We created a Coordinating Multiple Representation (CMR)…

The authors tested whether students can be taught to better understand conventional representations in diagrams, photographs, and other visual representations in science textbooks. The authors developed a teacher-delivered, workbook-and-discussion-based classroom instructional method called Conventions of Diagrams (COD). The authors trained 1…