Active-learning pedagogical practices are encouraged in the education literature to improve academic outcomes. The research reported in this paper explored the effect of real-time interactive polling--a type of active learning--on three measures of academic outcome: final marks, student engagement, and failure probability. To provide credible…

The ground-breaking image of a black hole's event horizon, which captured the public's attention and imagination in April 2019, was captured using the power of interferometry: many separate telescopes working together to observe the cosmos in incredible detail. Many recent astrophysical discoveries that have revolutionized the scientific…

Online tutorials are a way many librarians connect with students. The main benefit is the ability to reach more students than traditional face-to-face instruction sessions. In 2016, the Life & Health Sciences Librarian received instruction session requests for a freshman biology lab to teach students how to search for articles and use proper…

Building on prior research into active learning pedagogy in political science, I discuss the development of a new active learning strategy called the "thesis-building carousel," designed for use in political theory tutorials. This use of active learning pedagogy in a graduate student-led political theory tutorial represents the overlap…

Explicit emphasis on teaching science process skills leads to both gains in the skills themselves and, strikingly, deeper understanding of content. Here, we created and tested a series of online, interactive tutorials with the goal of helping undergraduate students develop science process skills. We designed the tutorials in accordance with…

The recent emphasis in higher education on both student engagement and online learning encouraged the authors to develop an active e-learning environment for an introductory geohazards course, which enrolls 70+ undergraduate students per semester. Instructors focused on replicating the achievements and addressing the challenges within an already…

The Hour of Code is a one-hour introduction to computer science organized by Code.org, a non-profit dedicated to expanding participation in computer science. This study investigated the impact of the Hour of Code on students' attitudes towards computer programming and their knowledge of programming. A sample of undergraduate students from two…

Although traditional lectures are still the dominant form of undergraduate instruction, there have been relatively few studies comparing various learner-centered and active learning teaching strategies to one another in order to guide professors in making informed instructional decisions. To study the impact of different active learning…

Computer aided assessment systems enable the collection of exact time and date information on students' activity on a course. These activity patterns reflect students' study habits and these study habits further predict students' likelihood to pass or fail a course. By identifying such patterns, those who design the courses can enforce positive…

The adoption of active learning instructional practices in college science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses has been shown to result in improvements in student learning, contribute to increased retention rates, and reduce the achievement gap among different student populations. Descriptions of active learning strategies…

Most faculty will agree that students must learn to write well (Emerson, MacKay, MacKay, & Funnell, 2006), and in the sciences, a variety of approaches have been taken. In the College of Physical and Engineering Science at the University of Guelph, we have developed a way of embedding research, writing, and analytical skills into an…