Undergraduate biology lab courses have long been criticized for engaging students in "cookbook" experiences in which students follow a given protocol to collect data that help answer a predetermined question. Recent reform documents in biology education have suggested that students should engage in lab courses that provide more authentic…

Many students now are receiving instruction in online environments created by universities, museums, corporations, and even students. What features of a given online course contribute to its effectiveness? This paper addresses that query by proposing and applying an analytic framework to five online introductory chemistry courses. Introductory…

Importance of stimulating interest in a course rather than reliance on grades or course difficulty. (Editor)

"Trade-offs" is an instructional television series of 15 programs designed to improve and expand economics instruction in fifth and sixth grade classrooms in the United States and Canada. This paper reviews 15 studies that have examined the impact of the "Trade-off" series, and seeks to determine how the series affects student…

Evaluation of a course in global education must determine whether a student knows basic information about the world and whether he sees himself as an integral part of that world. The evaluator is concerned with the quality of curriculum, teaching methods and materials, and with the actual content the student has learned. Both cognitive and…

This document examines the educational output of three alternative approaches to introductory macroeconomics at the University of Notre Dame. The framework for evaluation consists of the cognitive and affective tradeoffs entailed by using a new experimental course as opposed to two more traditional courses. The experimental course is a freshman…

This second part of a preliminary study considered the impacts of gender, cognitive learning styles, and computer attitudes on students' course satisfaction, based on their perceptions about their instructors' teaching strategies. The sample consisted of 60 male and 80 female undergraduates enrolled in two basic/developmental mathematics courses…

This paper focuses on the Interactive and Distance Education Assessment (IDEA) laboratory, an assessment system developed by psychology students and faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (New York) that incorporated learning styles, teaching styles, and other measures of individual difference into the evaluation of interactive and distance…