Quantitative reasoning, although included in most science courses, can be challenging to teach. In this article, we explore whether cooperative learning may help instructors teach quantitative reasoning and enhance students' understanding and learning experience. Our lesson was taught in a large introductory geoscience course. The lesson required…

We describe a hands-on, collaborative activity designed to illustrate general properties of evolution, provide practice for quantitative skills, promote creativity and collaboration, and enable student self-assessment of learning. During the activity, teams construct bridges using common office supplies. The best-performing bridge becomes the…

Using a cooperative learning framework in a quantitative reasoning laboratory course, students were assigned to static teams of four in which they adopted roles that rotated regularly. The roles included: team leader, protocol manager, data recorder, and researcher. Using a mixed-methods approach, we investigated students' perceptions of the team…

Collaborative learning in small groups is commonly implemented as a part of student-centered curricula. In large-enrollment courses, details of the interactions among students as a consequence of working in collaborative groups are often unknown but are important because how students interact influences the effectiveness of peer learning. We…

Introductory undergraduate science courses are traditionally offered as distinct units without formalized student interaction between classes. To bridge science courses, the authors used three Honors Organic Chemistry projects paired with other science courses. The honors students delivered presentations to mainstream organic course students and…

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…

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…

Peer-led team learning (PLTL) has been widely adopted for enhanced learning in a variety of disciplines, mostly in introductory chemistry, but also in organic chemistry, as in this study (Tien, Roth, and Kampmeier 2002). This pedagogical approach forms student groups led by students who have previously done well in the course (standard peer…

In this project, introductory college physics students (noneducation majors) were asked to teach simple machines to a class of second graders. This nontraditional activity proved to be a successful way to encourage college students to think critically about physics and how it applied to their everyday lives. The noneducation majors benefited by…