This study examines the within-field persistence rates of physical science/engineering (PS/E) students compared with those of students in life science, business, social science, education, and humanities. The data are drawn from a nationally representative sample of college matriculates and include students' high school and college transcript…

This case study involves the role of the kidneys in regulating blood pH and electrolytes. The case was used near the end of a two-semester Human Anatomy and Physiology course sequence, during the time when renal physiology was under study. Groups of two to three students were given the case and associated information (lab values, etc.). Students…

If college science instructors are to use inquiry practices more in the classroom, they need both professional support to foster comfort with the pedagogy and practical ways to engage students in inquiry. Over a semester, we studied 13 community college biology instructors as they adopted bioinformatics problem-based learning (PBL) modules in…

Learner-centered molecular modeling exercises in college science courses can be especially challenging for nonchemistry majors as students typically have a higher degree of anxiety and may not appreciate the relevance of the work. This article describes a learner-centered project given to allied health majors in a Biochemistry course. The project…

Social networking has become a prominent communication method in recent years. The objective of this study was to assess social media use and perception of utility in higher education classrooms among faculty, graduate, and undergraduate cohorts. As a case study, Twitter was included into a semester course to disseminate relevant course…

New technological developments have minimized training, hardware expense, and distribution problems for the production and use of instructional videos, and any science instructor can now make instructional videos for their classes. We created short "Khan style" videos for the topic of buffers in biochemistry and assigned them as…

Traditional lectures have come under increasing criticism as research indicates lectures may be less effective in achieving learning outcomes than other teaching methods. Student engagement and success can potentially be improved by changing traditional lectures to instructional methods using active learning techniques. Active learning refers to…

Three college faculty taught large general biology classes using case studies and personal response systems (clickers). Each instructor taught the same eight cases in two different sections, except the questions within the cases differed. In one section the questions were lower order (LO) factual inquiries, and in the other they were largely…

We used surveys and classroom observations to examine student reactions to two-stage exams, where students first do the exam individually and then redo it collaboratively. Our results show why both students and instructors appreciate this examination format: Two-stage collaborative examinations are relatively easy to implement, have a high…

Half of students who start college pursuing a degree in science drop out of the sciences by their senior year. This is due, in part, to low attendance and lack of preparation by the students. The failure to develop instructional strategies that actively engage students in science, however, is also a marked factor. A crucial need to reform how…

Instructors are frequently uncertain about the usefulness of methods to promote student-centered learning and uneasy about adopting new technologies such as clickers. We describe a study in which an honors biology instructor implemented clickers as a mechanism for students to complete in-class quizzes. To determine the usefulness of this approach,…

Summer research experiences have been identified as important vehicles for fostering the learning, skill development, and retention of undergraduates in the sciences. In this initiative, community college faculty and students partnered with private 4-year college colleagues on summer research in order to expand the capacity for research for…

Taking online courses is becoming a more common part of the college experience, but very little is known about student behaviors and strategies related to online assessment. This article reviews how students in an online Earth and Space Science course interact with various online assessments. Our two main findings are that our students do not use…

Although student production of arguments in group learning environments has been shown to promote scientific reasoning and understanding of science concepts, little previous work has examined the relationship of the structure of curricular materials to the production of argumentation. In this study, we examined this relationship for a collection…

Writing has an important role in science education and practice. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary collaboration between English rhetoric studies and biology, seemingly disparate disciplines, we describe a model for a scientific writing and communication course. The goals of the course were to prepare students for science-oriented careers, as well…