Attracting and retaining diverse individuals is a core goal for reform efforts within in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) gateway courses. Evidence-based instructional strategies in STEM, including those that incorporate scientific practices, have demonstrated promising findings regarding student learning gains. Inspired by…

Goal theory postulates that learners have both academic and social reasons for pursuing academic outcomes. In domain-learning theory, the development of expertise is domain specific and is a progressive learning process that is characterized by the interplay of knowledge, interest, and strategic processing. This study integrated goal theory and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of the "Lost Generation" alumni who ended their attendance or graduated from Arkansas Tech University (Tech) between January 1973 and December 1995 relating to their demographic characteristics, perceptions of college experiences, involvement with Tech after graduation, and attitudes…

Bilingualism (Sanz, 2000), motivation (Pintrich, 1989), and language aptitude (Grigorenko, Sternberg, and Ehrman, 2000) are crucial individual differences that contribute to successful adult language learning. Since Gardner's (1985) seminal work on motivation, many studies have shown that motivation is dynamic and that it affects language…