This article's authors describe both the advantages of a literacy-targeted introductory course and how it might be taught by employing evidence-based teaching practices developed by cognitive scientists to maximize learning. This pairing of literacy-focused content with evidence-based pedagogy is intended to enhance student learning while focusing…

We describe a first-semester, integrated, introductory biology and chemistry course for undergraduates at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA, USA. Our vision was to create a supportive learning community in which students could comfortably make connections between scientific disciplines as they learned necessary content for subsequent courses,…

International students outperform U.S. students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), while U.S. students increasingly leave these high-demand areas. To improve STEM education, it is imperative to determine the most effective and efficient instructional and organizational practices in these courses. This article identifies…

The authors write that the longer they study and work in organizations, the more they discover power to be one of the central issues which researchers and students must understand. Researchers who ignore power run the risk of spurious, irrelevant findings. Students who assume administrative positions without a proper understanding of power and how…

An instrumentation-based laboratory curriculum combining traditional unknown analyses with student-designed projects has been developed for an introductory analytical chemistry course. In the first half of the course, students develop laboratory skills and instrumental proficiency by rotating through six different instruments performing…

This paper presents a series of novel project-based learning labs for an introductory robotics course that are developed into a semester-long Robotic Decathlon. The last three events of the Robotic Decathlon are used as three final one-week-long project tasks; these replace a previous course project that was a semester-long robotics competition.…

The statistical preparation of in-service teachers, particularly middle school teachers, has been an area of concern for several years. This paper discusses the creation and delivery of an introductory statistics course as part of a master's degree program for in-service mathematics teachers. The initial course development took place before the…

In 2005, the "Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education" (GAISE) college report described several recommendations for teaching introductory statistics. This paper discusses how a large multi-section introductory course was redesigned in order to implement these recommendations. The experience described discusses…

We present the most recent steps undertaken to reform the introductory algebra-based course at The George Washington University. The reform sought to help students improve their problem-solving performance. Our pedagogy relies on didactic constructs such as the" GW-ACCESS problem-solving protocol," "instructional sequences" and…

Full class loads and inflexible schedules can be a significant obstacle in the implementation of freshman survey courses designed to guide engineering students into emerging research areas such as micro- and nanosystems. A hands-on, interactive course was developed to excite freshmen early in their engineering program to pursue research and…

There are many different approaches to teaching Information Systems courses. Studies have shown that if the student is interested in the topic, they just may have a more productive classroom experience. This paper documents the practice of structuring assignments around topics that are of interest to each individual student. This method has been…

Discusses the need to take enough time to properly teach second-language students grammatical rules and outlines major points in a first-year Spanish curriculum that stresses reviewing grammatical concepts throughout the four semesters. (18 references) (GLR)

This article describes a possible praxis for an undergraduate learning theories course. The philosophies of "a language-based theory of learning" (Wells, 1999), writing across the curriculum (Young, 1994), learner-centered education (Lambert & McCombs, 1998), and critical-thinking (Paul, 1995) are interwoven with the rationale and…

Qualitative research has become increasingly perceived as well suited to the advancement of counseling psychology, yet opportunities for formal training in qualitative inquiry remain inconsistently available within and across graduate programs. For the potential contribution of this approach to counseling psychology to be realized, graduate…

This two-part series describes the structure of the stoichiometry course at North Carolina State University. The course had a variety of learning objectives, and several nontraditional pedagogies were used in the course delivery. This first paper outlines the course structure and policies, the preparation given to the teaching assistants who…