CITRAL Resource Library

The authors focus on the impact of mixed methods of assessment, which minimizes the impact of high-stakes exams and rewards other methods of assessment, as a factor to explain the attrition of women in STEM. The authors demonstrate that the shift away from an exam emphasis benefits female students, thereby closing gaps in overall performance.

Using Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) as a guiding framework, the authors explored how culturally-specific realities impacted first generation students’ career choices. The findings suggest that familial ties and cultural expectations played key roles in determining how students navigated career choice.

Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) is an instructional strategy that involves using feedback from students to design in-class activities that build on the continuing feedback from students. This study shows that student performance improved when lectures based around difficulties flagged in student feedback were combined with in-class individual clicker questions and in-class peer discussion. The results show that these teaching strategies varied in their usefulness for different students and for different topics, and that no single learning activity in the instructional sequence yields maximum learning gains for all students.

Eddy et al. encourage instructors to consider structuring their in-class activities in ways that promote equity, which may require more purposeful attention to alleviating the current differential student experiences with peer discussions. The study’s results indicate that self-reported preferred roles in peer discussions can be predicted by student gender, race/ethnicity, and nationality.

Social-belonging interventions (e.g., peer discussions and reflexive writing activities) can have an impact on outcomes and persistence of students minoritized by their race or gender. 

Changes are underway in higher education to incorporate three-dimensional learning: emphasis on (1) scientific and engineering practices, (2) crosscutting concepts,  and (3) disciplinary core ideas. This is based on literature about how people learn science and how we can help students put their knowledge to use. The authors introduce the Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol (3D-LAP), which is designed to characterize and support the development of assessment tasks in biology, chemistry, and physics that align with transformation efforts.

For students, who commute or have obligations outside of college, the classroom is the crossroads where the social and the academic meet. If academic and social involvement or integration is to occur, it must occur in the classroom. Thus research should do more to incorporate the role of the classroom into current theories.

Findings: Authors found that exam scores for all students were lowest in  the  face-to-face  course.  Hispanic  and  Black  students  had  higher  scores  in  the  hybrid format compared with online and face-to-face, while white students had the highest performance in the online format.

Examines to what extent the characteristics of instructor-generated tests (designed to include more constructed response questions) impact the exam performance of male and female and middle/high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) students enrolled in introductory biology courses? Find that males and middle/high-SES students were disproportionately favored constructed response questions exams increased. Additionally, middle/high-SES students were favored as the proportion of constructed-response questions on exams increased.

LGTBQIA students do not always experience the undergraduate biology classroom to be a welcoming or accepting place for their identities. In contrast to traditional lectures, active-learning classes increase the relevance of their LGBTQIA identities due to the increased interactions among students during group work.

Introductory astronomy students' overall average attitudes and approaches to problem solving score was significantly more favorable than that of introductory physics students. Research suggests that introductory physics courses would benefit from more realistic contextualization.

Kellam et al. demonstrate that for faculty, understanding students’ emotions can provide more complete understanding experiences that lead students  to either persist or leave undergraduate engineering programs and that impact students’  experiences in engineering programs in ways that that influence learning.

Conceptual learning engages all aspects of an individual: cognitive, metacognitive, and affective. Within the affective domain, Trujillo and Tanner explore self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and science identity, as well as emerging assessment tools to monitor these dimensions of students’ learning.

Constructive criticism within an educational environment of ‘wise-schooling’ could offer useful opportunities for faculty to enhance minority students’ academic success and educational satisfaction.

This special issue is both about and a product of conversations concerning academic development. It includes research and reflections on five major conditions that enable, and the changes that emerge from, ‘significant conversations’ about teaching in higher education. These five conditions include cross-disciplinary participation, trustful relationships, conducive spaces, co-construction practices, and caring attitudes.

This booklet summarizes empirical studies on why the classroom climate is important for learning. It also examines some of the challenges associated with diversity in classroom environments. Lastly, it presents research on how to prepare for and sustain an inclusive classroom climate for all students.

After the conversion of a face-to-face research mentor training curriculum into an online course, graduate students and postdoc participants from the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) reported high satisfaction with the synchronous online training and increased confidence in their mentoring.