Using structural equation modeling, this study identifies the direct and indirect relationships among campus diversity climate, faculty attitudes, student--faculty interaction, and cognitive skills development, examining how the relationships differ by students' race/ethnicity. With data from the University of California Undergraduate Experience…

To contextualize the myriad of teaching development efforts available to faculty, this large-scale study of nearly 4,500 faculty at four-year institutions broadens our understandings of who participates in teaching development practices, how their participation relates to their institutional environments, and how their participation connects to…

Pre-service and beginning in-service science teachers enrolled in a university teacher education program participated in a project to support their teaching through a lens of sustainability. While they demonstrated active and positive engagement, I considered the possibility of any students reacting negatively to the course material and doing so…

Groupwork is a useful classroom tool, but may not fully benefit students who are ostracized by peers due to nonacademic factors, like weight. Here, undergraduate students estimated GPAs of hypothetical student peers who were described as "overweight" or "normal-weight" and judged how much they wanted to work with them. We found…

Not all instructors find the process of establishing positive interpersonal relationships with students easy. Even for the most experienced instructor, determining the best ways to establish and strengthen relationships with students in higher education settings can, at times, be difficult. As noted in the literature, instructor-student…

The experiences of first-generation college students (FGCS) can guide the development of effective practices for supporting and retaining these students. Open-ended interviews with 10 FGCS produced themes related to challenges and strategies for success. Applied thematic analysis identified barriers in school, home, and work settings, including a…

Recent years have witnessed the spread of purpose-built active learning classrooms throughout the higher education sector. While these innovative learning spaces are well-suited for a variety of active learning strategies, their lack of a single focal point means they are inconvenient spaces for lecturing. While educational developers often…

The author unpacks and utilizes the pedagogical success of improvisational theatre ensembles, offers core course design elements inspired by improv that match best practices, and gives concrete ideas for immediate use to strengthen community and increase engagement in college classrooms. Ensemble Culture is a framework for building community in…

College students are directly immersed in the Age of Distraction brought on by advances in technology and information overload. During the COVID-19 pandemic, students also reported unprecedented stress and anxiety. In this research, I studied the experiences of 61 undergraduate and graduate students at a private college by starting classes with a…

In 2014, the popular conversation about safe space in the classroom tended to mock marginalized students seeking protection. Nearly a decade later, the discourse has become protectionist toward majority students allegedly discriminated against by being informed that they benefit from racism, sexism and heterosexism. What, then, does it mean to…

As strategies for co-creation in teaching and learning, the democratic classroom and students-as-partners pedagogies seek to empower students by equally distributing the responsibilities of decision-making across the students and instructors in a class. In this essay, we describe and analyze how students in a second-year interdisciplinary seminar…

This qualitative, narrative study explores the experiences of college students with disabilities before and during the remote learning period. Three main themes emerged as critical influences on student perceptions of institutional access and inclusion: accommodations and accessibility; building relationships and community and course structure and…

The development of undergraduate students' soft skills is crucial because their chances to satisfactorily deal with the demands of various environments and interlocutors increases with the development of their soft skills. Based on the achievement goal theory, this study aimed to examine the role of the school environment in fostering students'…

Modern college classrooms are increasingly diverse. We face classes where 18-year-olds sit beside grandmothers, native speakers of English sit beside speakers of other languages, and Christians, Jews, and Muslims share classrooms with atheists and agnostics. The question is: how do we take such a varied and ideologically differentiated group of…

The use of video is prevalent in both face-to-face and online classrooms. Online learning leverages the use of video to support and provide instruction through the visuals video affords. The following study documents how undergraduate students interacted with video both in online and face-to-face environments and includes their video-watching…