The purpose of this article is to explore the use of authentic audiences in higher education to support undergraduate learning. To explore the results of integrating authentic audiences in higher education, we present a collective case study in which the use of authentic audiences was employed in separate undergraduate courses at two different…

Academic institutions are now expected to engage in developing and assessing learning outcomes; however, responsibility outcomes, such as respect for human dignity (RFHD), can be particularly challenging. As part of our Biopsychology course and Sensation and Perception course over the past decade, we applied the scientist-educator model of…

Research consistently demonstrates that the quality of student-staff interactions matters for positive student outcomes. Some research studies also suggest that identity similarities (homophily) often contribute to meaningful human connections. Yet, the influence of student and staff identities on teaching and learning in higher education is less…

Conceptualizing mentoring beyond a traditional one-to-one mentor-mentee model, we utilized a constellation framework with collaborative co-mentoring among faculty, staff, near-peers, and community partners. We conducted a multi-method study to examine faculty, staff, and students' perceptions of mentoring relationships, and we focus in this…

This paper combines inclusive teaching, cultural humility, and Universal Design for Learning to contextualize the creation and evaluation of human services courses designed collaboratively with students. The collaborative course design was completed in two undergraduate classes with a combined total of 27 student participants. The paper provides…

This article makes a case for the effectiveness of using imitation-style teaching as a way to introduce how to write theoretically informed pieces of literary or media criticism to undergraduates. By making a case for the relevance of teaching this form of criticism in the undergraduate classroom, as well as exploring exactly how imitation-style…

This study examines the impact of students' identities on how students participate in classroom discussions in postsecondary courses. Participation in such discussions is known to increase students' learning, but, despite this, little is known about how students' identities influence how and whether they choose to participate. Drawn from a larger…

There is growing attention to student assessments designed to reach beyond the classroom, including assessments with an immediate or future audience. The impact of audience, however, has not been examined in multimodal assessments across continents, institutions, disciplines, and teaching contexts. Using qualitative data, this article examines the…

To promote the development of critical thinking abilities in an introductory undergraduate humanities course in the context of mass higher education, we implemented a course design that employed a series of scenario-based multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and informal peer discussions. Using an online survey to gather perception data and…

This paper explores the effect of collaborative learning on academic motivation among students from 17 institutions throughout the United States. Even in the presence of a wide array of potential confounders, collaborative learning exerted a statistically significant and positive influence on students' academic motivation levels across four years…

Writing a thesis is often the culminating experience for undergraduate students enrolled in university honors programs in the United States. Because writing a thesis is one of the most difficult academic tasks that an undergraduate student may undertake, it requires a high level of self-efficacy, or belief in one's capabilities to achieve certain…

A key debate in higher education is how assessment and feedback can be constructed to maximize opportunities for meaningful student learning. In this paper, we explore how a learning-focused model of feedback, teacher-student dialogic feed-forward, is enacted in practice, exposing many affordances but also some challenges. Adopting a small-scale…

The Undergraduate Scholarships with Mathematics and Science Training, Exploration, and Research Program (US MASTER) is a STEM scholarship program funded by the United States National Science Foundation. It was implemented at an upper-Midwest institution to target and provide structured support to low-income, academically talented undergraduates in…

This paper studies undergraduate student attitudes towards team-based projects, connecting those attitudes to challenges and overall perception of this work. This study was conducted with 220 students in the context of three subjects taught at a Spanish University, that included collaborative projects as mandatory assignments to be developed over…

Unfamiliarity and uncertainty can be disorienting, but when provided space to collectively navigate such challenges, opportunities arise for novel ways of engaging, collaborating, and navigating in our varied communities--including those in higher education. This article builds on previous students-as-partners (SaP) research by describing a…