CITRAL Resource Library

Students prefer and do better in flipped classrooms when pre-class videos feature only the instructor, rather than the instructor with a student.

Applies Critical Race Theory (CRT) to explain racial inequalities in retention and graduation rates. Proposes a practical model for leveraging CRT concepts to address racial inequalities in student outcomes and experiences.

Documenting mathematics as a racialized space becomes difficult due to the invisibility and neutrality of Whiteness in institutions. The authors develop a framework that illustrates three dimensions of White institutional space - institutional, labor, and identity - to support mathematics educators in combating racist structures.

Authors find that course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) enables shifts in student conceptions of what it means to think like a scientist. They move from more novice-like approaches to this thinking to more expert-like ones.  At the end of the course, students identified experimental repetition, data analysis, and collaboration as important elements of thinking like a scientist.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) enable more students to gain research experience, compared with the traditional apprenticeship model. The authors propose expanding on the CURE model to provide field-based research experiences to more students.

Miller and Tanner organize and explain 50 key terms to improve scientific teaching, an intentional approach to teaching that focuses on student learning and involves iterative questioning, evidence collection, and innovation.

Fostering a classroom environment where STEM students build social relationships can increase their interest in and persistence towards a degree in STEM. Activities involving affirmation values are productive mechanisms for building students’ social networks in their STEM courses.

The authors describe an eight-hour research mentor training curriculum  that data suggest is an effective means of engaging mentors to improve their research mentoring practices. The training resulted in high satisfaction, self-reported skill gains, as well as behavioral changes of clinical and translational research mentors.

There is a positive impact of administering a mandatory success course for first year college students placed on academic probation after their first semester. Such impacts include an increase in persistence and graduation.

As an admissions requirement, the GRE is poor at selecting the most capable students and severely restricts the flow of women and minorities into the sciences. Studies find only a weak correlation between the test and ultimate success in STEM fields. De-emphasizing the GRE and augmenting admissions procedures with measures of other attributes — such as drive, diligence and the willingness to take scientific risks — would not make graduate admissions more predictive of the ability to do well and increase diversity in STEM.

Poole examines the costs and benefits of organizing universities in terms of disciplines and departments. He argues that disciplines often help scholars and students make sense of academic worlds and research processes, but they can also limit acceptance of divergent perspectives and abilities to understand other disciplinary ways of thinking and researching.

The studies analyzed here document that active learning leads to increases in examination performance that would raise average grades by a half a letter and that failure rates under traditional lecturing increase by 55% over the rates observed under active learning.

This study asserts that on average, active learning reduces achievement gaps in exam scores and passing rates. Based on their findings, they suggest that widespread implementation of high-quality active learning can help reduce or eliminate achievement gaps in STEM courses and promote equity in higher education.

In this short chapter, Rose demonstrates the ways that context shapes writing strategies and abilities, making it difficult to judge or assess a student writer’s ability by examining one sample of writing. Rose argues that “all writers have more to learn” is a threshold concept that can help shape assessment practices and can help empower writers to view difficulties as opportunities for learning something new about writing.

Studies suggest that cooperative learning has a variety of positive and measurable outcomes on students at a variety of cognitive levels and in a variety of disciplines. The authors discuss five essential elements that are necessary to construct positive, effective cooperative group learning situations: Positive Interdependence, Face-to-Face Promotive Interaction, Individual and Group Accountability, Interpersonal and Small-Group Skills, and Group Processing.

This brief article describes the range of activities involved in writing assessment and demonstrates the ways that writing assessments can both shape and be shaped by classroom and disciplinary contexts. Inoue argues that assessment can shape relationships and power between teachers, students, and institutions, and can be shaped by individual or institutional factors and values.

The authors suggest instructors can leverage attention in the classroom by employing ideas from cognitive neuroscience and psychology using two key dimensions: intern/external attention and on-topic/off-topic attention. Claim that some teaching approaches are more effective than others because they leverage natural fluctuations in student attention.