Faculty perceptions of textbook quality, anecdotal posts to listservs, and published ratings frequently determine textbook choice. Although faculty members intend to have students use the textbooks, few published empirical studies assess student opinions. In two studies, students rated widely adopted introductory psychology textbooks on eight…

Mindful practices have been found to decrease levels of stress, anxiety, and burnout, while enhancing resilience and coping in those who engage in them. The beneficial effects of mindfulness on improving physiological and psychological well-being are well supported within the literature. However, little has been done to learn how faculty in higher…

Through anthropological analysis, two professors--one Mestiza (Apache and Spanish American), one Northern-Western European American (Danish, Swedish, German, French, English, and Irish), and six Native American educational leadership doctoral students offer storied sketches of three college professors on intersections of culture and college…

Retention in higher education has become an important area of focus in recent years; however, much of the research has been conducted on large, research-intensive universities, leading to questions of whether these findings apply to institutions with different characteristics. In the current study, forty four students at a small, teaching-focused…

Emotional labor accompanying academic work is often gendered and racialized, and such labor may be heightened for those teaching diversity courses. This article reports on interviews with 38 faculty members teaching diversity courses required as part of general education programs at three predominantly White liberal arts colleges in the…

Teachers' competence in launching and managing pedagogical change collaboratively is crucial for the continuous development of their work as well as for meaningful student learning. However, research on how teachers can thrive in their profession in the changing higher education environment is limited. This study investigated the experiences of…

The purpose of this study was to identify areas of APA formatting that college instructors view as most problematic in student writing. Using a Likert-style survey, the greatest areas of reported concern were problems with documentation, specifically, citations, references, and quoting; of lesser concern were various style and formatting errors in…

This study aimed to investigate Chinese students' perceptions of effective teaching. Four hundred and thirty college students participated in this investigation. They were asked to identify 3 to 6 characteristics of effective college instructors and explain why. Themes were extracted from these qualitative data via constant comparison analysis,…

Google Docs, an online word processing application, is a promising tool for collaborative learning. However, many college instructors and students lack knowledge to effectively use Google Docs to enhance teaching and learning. Goals of this study include (1) assessing the effectiveness of using Google Docs in an out-of-class collaborative writing…