Badges in education are an increasingly popular phenomenon, and a variety of questions exists as to the abilities and effectiveness of badges. In this study, the effect of digital badges within a Moodle-based online homework system was studied for an undergraduate general physics course at a large research-based university in northeast Taiwan. One…

Inequities in student access to trigonometry and calculus are often associated with racial and socioeconomic privilege, and often influence introductory physics course performance. To mitigate these disparities in student preparedness, we developed a two-pronged intervention consisting of (1) incentivized supplemental math assignments and (2)…

Socrative is an online assessment and student response tool that provides opportunities to increase student engagement in the classroom. We used Socrative as an online homework completing platform to increase students' exam scores in physics. To explore the relationships among factors and the educational effectiveness of Socrative, data from 85…

How do you motivate students to do their homework? Some instructors make students' homework scores a significant percentage of the final course grade. In that case, how much course credit is required? Some instructors do not grade homework at all, instead relying on students' intrinsic motivation to learn the course material. Will this actually…

A traditional physical science course was transformed into an environmental physical science course to teach physics to non-science majors. The objective of the new course was to improve the learning of basic physics principles by applying them to current issues of interest. A new curriculum was developed with new labs, homework assignments,…

The Blackboard Learning System™, a Web-based server software system, is widely used on many college and university campuses today. This paper explores the use of the Blackboard system as a teaching and learning tool. Particular emphasis is placed on the online chat feature available through the Blackboard interface. During the fall 2002 pilot…