There is a growing need for valid and reliable measures to monitor the efficacy of undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) reform initiatives. The Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) is a widely used tool originally designed to measure the presence of overt instructor and student behaviors.…

This paper presents community college (CC) instructors' responses to the Community College Anatomy and Physiology Educational Research (CAPER) project, a professional development program focused on active learning and educational research. We engage with conceptual change theory to better understand why and how CC instructors shifted their…

Attention is thought to be the gateway between information and learning, yet there is much we do not understand about how students pay attention in the classroom. Leveraging ideas from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, we explore a framework for understanding attention in the classroom, organized along two key dimensions: internal/external…

Team-based learning (TBL) is a highly intense active learning pedagogy that uses a cycle of preclass preparation, formative assessment for readiness, mini-lectures, and complex team exercises. Consistent with the literature on active learning, prior research on TBL consistently shows its benefits for student outcomes as compared with previous…

Large introductory science courses are a particularly important and challenging target for creating inclusive learning environments. In this study, we examined the impact of incorporating learning assistants (LAs) on the learning environment in an introductory biology course taught with two different structures: an in-person lecture with…

Mounting evidence of the efficacy of active learning has prompted educators to consider adoption of these practices in college-level classrooms. One tenet of active learning is that most, if not all, students have the ability to learn. Instructors' perspectives on learning, however, may or may not be aligned with this. One belief held by some…

Previous studies have found that students' concept-building approaches, identified a priori with a cognitive psychology laboratory task, are associated with student exam performances in chemistry classes. Abstraction learners (those who extract the principles underlying related examples) performed better than exemplar learners (those who focus on…

Active learning is frequently used to describe teaching practices, but the term is not well-defined in the context of undergraduate biology education. To clarify this term, we explored how active learning is defined in the biology education literature (n = 148 articles) and community by surveying a national sample of biology education researchers…

The second edition of "Entering Research" (ER) is a collection of customizable active-learning activities, resources, and assessment and evaluation tools for use in undergraduate and graduate research training programs and courses. Results from two design and development research studies examining the effectiveness of the second edition…

Limited access to undergraduate research experiences for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students has led to creation of classroom-based opportunities for students to participate in authentic science. Revising laboratory courses to engage students in the practices of science has been shown to have many benefits for students.…

Overwhelming evidence demonstrating the benefits of active-learning pedagogy has led to a shift in teaching that requires students to interact more in the classroom. To date, few studies have assessed whether there are gender-specific differences in participation in active-learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses,…

Not all instructors implement active-learning strategies in a way that maximizes student outcomes. One potential explanation for variation in active-learning effectiveness is variation in the teaching knowledge an instructor draws upon. Guided by theoretical frameworks of pedagogical content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, this study…

Peer instruction, a form of active learning, is generally defined as an opportunity for peers to discuss ideas or to share answers to questions in an in-class environment, where they also have opportunities for further interactions with their instructor. When implementing peer instruction, instructors have many choices to make about group design,…

Evidence-based teaching (EBT), such as active learning and formative assessment, benefits student learning but is not present in many college science classrooms. The choices faculty make about how to teach their science courses are influenced by their personal beliefs and motivations, as well as their departmental structures and institutional…

Student anxiety is a growing concern for colleges and universities. As science classrooms transition from traditional lecture to active learning, researchers have sought to understand how active learning affects undergraduate anxiety. However, although community colleges educate nearly half of all undergraduates, no studies have explored the…