This study seeks to determine whether giving an explicit incentive to students in an upper-division first-semester electromagnetism course (EM1), in the form of partial credit for reworking unit exam problems, will improve their problem-solving skills as measured by performance on identical problems on the final exam. Three problems--a primarily…

Seventh graders from a STEM school performed poorly with rational number concepts in the yearly standardized test. This research investigated the impact of a three-day professional development intervention focused on improving math teachers' self-efficacy when teaching rational numbers. The study employed a concurrent mixed-method research design…

There is currently no designated policy, procedure or staff in place to facilitate the objective of increasing student yield. As a result, magnet applications and acceptance of invitations to attend Owl Middle School is approached without a strategy which makes planning difficult and negates the ability to determine effective methods. Filling…

This study investigates the role of a collaboration script, the Funnel Model, in supporting students' computer-supported collaborative scientific argumentation, and how the students appropriated the collaboration script in scientific argumentation. In this exploratory case study, a class of 33 Secondary grade four students went through four phases…

Magnet schools provide innovative curricula designed to attract students from other schools within a school district, typically with the joint goals of diversifying enrollment and boosting achievement. Measuring the impact of attending a magnet school is challenging because students choose to apply and schools have priorities over types of…

Urban school districts have seen low scores on NWEA Map math scores (Education Recovery Scoreboard, 2024). To foster and promote urban youths' capabilities to learn mathematics, a new method to teach, enhance, and remediate understanding of fractions was developed, Fractions and Signed Numbers Workshop (FracSi). It utilizes the approach of an…

Learning assistants (LAs) play a pivotal role in transforming traditional physics instruction toward a more inquiry-oriented approach. While empirical evidence supports the effectiveness of LA-involved physics instruction, there is a research gap regarding the specific competencies of LAs that contribute to improved conceptual understanding. One…

This study employed design-based logistic regression to examine the extent to which attending a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) magnet high school, school demographics, and student-level factors explain a student's intent to declare a STEM major in the first semester of college. The results show only student-level factors…

Limiting case analysis (LCA) is important to practicing physicists. Yet, there is little concrete guidance for physics educators, and a lack of consensus in the research community about how to help students learn, and learn from, limiting case analysis. In this study, we first review existing literature to find commonalities and variations in how…

Researchers have expressed concern about the state of STEM education. To improve this situation, new pedagogies, such as blended learning, have been proposed and tested. The last decade has seen an increase in the use of blended learning to support learning; however, the effect of blended learning on learning remains unclear and often mixed. The…