Colleges and universities may desire to become more trauma-informed in light of our growing understanding of the impact that trauma can have on student outcomes. However, there has been little research on what strategies and practices colleges and universities should implement to become more trauma-informed. One approach to this work could be to…

To reduce academic dishonesty and strengthen learning outcomes, I adopted in-depth oral examinations as my benchmark and summative assessments in a Human Anatomy & Physiology course taught in an online asynchronous setting. This decision led my students and me down the transformative path of mastery learning. This was a "threshold…

Providing students with opportunities to wrestle with and engage with messy, real-world problems can be challenging in traditional, higher education courses. However, for students in helping and applied professions, engaging with challenging problems in a supportive environment is critical to developing their skills and confidence. This paper…

Our initial impetus for this project stems from the development of UNCP's Indigenous Cultures & Communities (ICC) graduation requirement. We recognize the efforts of individual faculty representing disciplines in the arts, education, humanities, library, and nursing to redesign class activities and courses. Our purpose is to share models and…

Students may sometimes benefit from due date extensions due to significant extenuating circumstances. These circumstances, though, may not be supported by documentation as required by university policies. Given this, I implemented a flexible due date policy called the Pause Button (PB) in a 16-week behavioral sciences research methods course.…

The jigsaw technique has been successfully used in classrooms for decades, though less in higher education. Groups are formed with each student having a precise piece of information necessary to complete the assignment. Next, expert groups of students with the same material meet to sharpen their understanding before reforming their initial group…

Epistemic beliefs are one's assumptions about knowledge and knowing. Given the research in educational psychology that established epistemic beliefs as reliable predictors of student success, we devised a pedagogical intervention to improve students' epistemic beliefs. In this study, we examined the effectiveness of the reflective writing task as…

Design thinking is a critical and creative process understood to support innovation and creative idea generation in a wide variety of contexts. Increasingly, it is being used as a pedagogical approach by educators interested in supporting divergent thinking skill development. This study evaluated the effects of the use of design thinking practices…

Professors and students have contradictory views of course reading. Professors believe that reading outside of the classroom is essential in optimizing learning. However, students often find the readings to be time-consuming, not necessary to pass the class, and an option rather than a requirement. We surveyed 449 undergraduate university students…

We examined the relationship between the levels of sophistication (high-sophisticated and low-sophisticated) of students' domain general epistemic beliefs and an important component of students' critical thinking skills--their ability to evaluate arguments. Participants evaluated arguments and took an epistemic belief survey before recalling…

The following study examined the effect of mindful practices on college student attitudes and learning comprehension using two sections of an introductory biology course taught by the same instructor. One section used lecture complemented with active learning formats while the other section additionally included mindful practices. Comparisons were…

Project-based learning (PBL) is considered an engaging and promising pedagogy across diverse disciplines and student populations in the United States in the digital age. Research on PBL in online environments and in the field of art has, however, been limited. Thus, the purpose of the current study was to examine the theoretical grounds of PBL and…

Can creativity be taught? Multiple sources attest that the business community values creativity in potential new hires, but a signature pedagogy of teaching for creativity in business classes has not yet emerged. To contribute to a body of evidence-based practice, this study assessed the impact of several in-class activities that were deployed…

This empirical study examined preferences between teacher-centered and student-centered teaching methods and academic major with 507 undergraduate college students. Surveys were administered to the students that assessed their level of agreement with teaching methods utilized in the classroom. The results indicate that across all academic majors,…

This paper describes the principles of transformative pedagogy that lead to the development of distinct student voices in academic writing classes. Whether the course is taught at the undergraduate level through research, expository, and argumentative writing assignments or at the graduate level through literature review essays, research articles,…