Psychometrics is the field of designing tests and assessments to measure certain psychological concepts. It is chiefly concerned with two fundamental properties: reliability and validity. These properties are often influenced by confounding variables: other things that can influence performance but are not what you are trying to measure. Here, I…

Ten years ago, after 20 years as a university professor, I was asked to direct the teaching and learning support center at my university. I quickly realized I had almost no knowledge of the published scholarship on this subject. From my reading of this literature, I found the research on the predictors of student learning particularly informative.…

International students outperform U.S. students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), while U.S. students increasingly leave these high-demand areas. To improve STEM education, it is imperative to determine the most effective and efficient instructional and organizational practices in these courses. This article identifies…

Online education can be leveraged to help current students complete their degrees and to attract new students. While online learning is not new, in recent years, it has been moving away from the periphery of higher education and becoming a central component of institutional strategies for increasing student enrollment, retention, and completion.…

This case study explores a novel form of classroom simulation that differs from published examples in two important respects. First, it is ongoing. While most simulations represent a single learning episode embedded within a course, the ongoing simulation is a continuous set of interrelated events and decisions that accompany learning throughout…

An instrumentation-based laboratory curriculum combining traditional unknown analyses with student-designed projects has been developed for an introductory analytical chemistry course. In the first half of the course, students develop laboratory skills and instrumental proficiency by rotating through six different instruments performing…

Energy issues are becoming increasingly common subjects of instruction in undergraduate- and graduate-level classrooms across a variety of disciplines. The interdisciplinary character of energy studies provides geographers with a great opportunity to present different applied and theoretical approaches to help students conceptualize energy issues…

We present the most recent steps undertaken to reform the introductory algebra-based course at The George Washington University. The reform sought to help students improve their problem-solving performance. Our pedagogy relies on didactic constructs such as the" GW-ACCESS problem-solving protocol," "instructional sequences" and…

This study uses formal and informal student feedback as a source for understanding the impact of experimental course elements. Responses were used to develop a codebook, which was then applied to the entire dataset. The results inform our understanding of student's conceptions of professional identity, learning styles and curriculum design.…

In this teaching method, instead of lecturing to notebook-filling recipients, the teacher seeks to draw information from the student, by means of skillfully directed questions, and to free the student to think for himself. (Author)

Ten years ago, after 20 years as a university professor, I was asked to direct the teaching and learning support center at my university. I quickly realized I had almost no knowledge of the published scholarship on this subject. From my reading of this literature, I found the research on the predictors of student learning particularly informative.…

Undergraduate geography field courses are relatively rare at American universities, though they can exemplify well the fundamental tenets of learner-centered education. This article reports on an intensive three-week field analysis course taught at Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff, within the Department of Geography, Planning, and…

There are cognitive, social, personal, and practical reasons for studying a second language, and the syllabus is shaped by these and the identity of the learners, general and specific course objectives, educational principles, course components, learner input, and student evaluation procedures. A dynamic syllabus addresses four language competence…

Weekly testing coupled with a mastery performance requirement generated higher student performance in an introductory psychology class. (DE)

Collection of articles describes new approaches at four universities. (RT)