At a large, diverse, hispanic-serving, master's-granting university, the Alma Project was created to support the rich connections of life experiences of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students that come from racially diverse backgrounds through reflective journaling. Utilizing frameworks in ethnic studies and social…

Recently, powerful new observations and advances in computation and visualization have led to a revolution in our understanding of the structure of the Universe. As the field of cosmology advances, it is of interest to study how student ideas relate to scientific understanding. In this paper, we examine in-depth undergraduate students' ideas on…

Continuing our work from a previous study (Coble et al. 2013), we examine undergraduates' ideas on the composition of the Universe as they progress through a general education astronomy integrated lecture and laboratory course with a focus on active learning. The study was conducted over five semesters at an urban minority-serving institution. The…

We have undertaken a multi-semester study of student ideas in an undergraduate general education astronomy integrated lecture and lab course with a focus on active learning at an urban, minority serving institution. We collected individual interviews ("N" = 15) and course artifacts ("N" approximately 60), such as pre-course…