A first year non-majors biology course, with an enrollment of around 440 students, has been redesigned from a course of traditional content and teaching style to one that emphasizes biological concepts in current global issues and incorporates active learning strategies. We were informed by the education literature incorporating many aspects of…

This paper reports on the effects of a graduate course on teaching and learning on graduate teaching assistants' conceptions of teaching and on the teaching philosophy statements that arose from those conceptions. Effects are interpreted from three perspectives: 1) course facilitators' reports of their perceptions of course…

Student development has connections to important academic purposes in higher education (King, Baxter Magolda, Barber, Kendall Brown & Lindsay, 2009). In particular, a growing body of work on self-authorship, a social-constructive theory of development, has demonstrated relevance to the purposes of higher education (Baxter Magolda, 2001; King…

Concerned about the success rate of new students in our program we designed and implemented a compulsory set of experiences which aim to support students in their transition from high school to university by (1) developing their sense of belonging to a community of learners and by (2) articulating with them the interrelationships among their first…

A peer-mentoring program was developed for students in an introductory biology course at a university in Ontario, Canada. Students could attend up to five peer-mentoring sessions during their first semester. Quantitative-survey, participation, and academic data spanning from 2003 through 2007 were reviewed for the purpose of evaluating the…