Undergraduates reported the impact of pedagogical practices on their perceived stress. Overall, clustered deadlines, unclear instructions, pop quizzes, high-stakes assignments, and cold calling created the most stress. Policies that allow grade recovery, clear instructions, feeling known by the professor, and flexible deadlines alleviated the most…

Instructors expect students to read before class to engage them in using higher-order thinking skills that are critical to performing in group work and engaging in discussions. As many instructors are aware, however, for various reasons many students don't read the assigned textbook. In this study, science news articles were used as prereadings to…

The author assesses the evolution of classroom community through an examination of three subsequent semesters of a large undergraduate education course at a regional, comprehensive university. The evolution and modification of course format and assignments across three semesters are treated as interventions to foster interactions among students…

Students in a course on the psychology of language and thought first wrote flash fiction stories and analyzed them using course concepts. As an experiential learning exercise, they subsequently analyzed those stories for a number of psycholinguistic variables using the discourse technology Coh-Metrix. Their assignment was to change a number of…

Understanding student perceptions of the elements that affect positive team experiences helps inform faculty about their use of teams in the classroom. Using Q Methodology (Stephenson, 1935), students evaluated a large set of teamwork elements. The results indicate both areas of student agreement as well as significant differences in perceptions…

Understanding community college English language learner (ELL) goals may help educators better support ELLs to set and pursue those goals. One lens that has illuminated important differences in ELL goals is constructive-developmental theory (CDT). Using a CDT lens, this qualitative case study investigated the goals of six community college ELLs…

Academic dishonesty is pervasive on college campuses, but few researchers have explored students' situational decisions about cheating. This qualitative study explores influences on students' decisions about academic dishonesty, particularly how students' course contexts affect their decisions. The author found that course context factors heavily…

The authors compared student perceptions and performance in a fully online versus a flipped undergraduate diversity course. Students' performance on course assignments and responses to surveys assessing perceptions of learning climate, basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness), motivation, relevance, and learning gains were…

The author presents self-report data from students in three upper-level undergraduate courses to illustrate the comparative effectiveness of different out-of-class assessment approaches in promoting completion and comprehension of reading assignments. Students reported agreeing or strongly agreeing that all three assignments motivated them to…

This study evaluated syllabi (N = 87) from introductory advertising and public relations courses to examine to what extent and how stated course goals and assignments signal the overall learning orientation of a course and which type of learning orientation--mastery or performance--was most common. Mastery orientations emphasize intrinsic rewards,…

The author describes the principal findings of a survey study looking at student perceptions of a new form-based approach to reflective journaling. A form-based journal assignment was developed for use in introductory lecture courses and tested over a two-year period in an Honors General Chemistry course for engineers with a total of 157…

The author examined Wikipedia's use as an instructional tool in two studies. The widespread use of Wikipedia indicates that students need to learn more about its workings and validity. Wikipedia articles relevant to psychology were edited by students in one class and critiqued in another class. Analysis of the subsequent editing of students'…

Lack of class preparation by students is an impediment to establishing an active-learning classroom community. Participation Preparation Assignments encourage students to complete assigned reading and to work with relevant concepts in active ways even before arriving in class. The author presents empirical data (both objective and attitudinal)…

The authors investigated changes in self-efficacy in writing and writing apprehension in a sample of first-year college students in an interdisciplinary writing-intensive course taught by faculty from varied disciplines at a liberal arts college. Results showed that self-efficacy in writing significantly increased while writing apprehension…

Research regarding rubrics in K-12 classrooms and in higher education has focused on teachers' perceptions and use of them. Rubrics have been found to objectify subjective assignments, ensure accountability, and improve student understanding of teacher expectations (Andrade, 2000; Hall & Salmon, 2003; Walvoord & Anderson, 1998). This study focuses…