Cognitive engagement is an essential component in student learning. With the increase of more asynchronous virtual educational tools in classrooms, there is a need to understand how students are engaging with classroom content in these formats. Several studies have examined student and teacher perceptions of cognitive engagement in virtual…

We tested the long-term effects of a utility-value intervention administered in a gateway chemistry course, with the goal of promoting persistence and diversity in STEM. In a randomized controlled trial (N = 2,505), students wrote three essays about course content and its personal relevance or three control essays. The intervention significantly…

Narrative storytelling surrounds us. Narratives are especially salient in politics, as policy problems do not simply exist, but are actively created through the stories policy actors tell. Scholars introduced the narrative policy framework (NPF) to create a generalized framework for studying how policy actors use storytelling strategically to…

Greater financial literacy is critically needed among young adults in the United States, but many financial literacy education courses have been less effective than hoped for by educators and researchers. Additionally, many have not been designed around established curricula or learning science principles, rendering findings difficult for…

Objective: This study explores whether variability in the implementation of an undergraduate course on human flourishing is differentially associated with student outcomes. Participants: 101 students in the "Art and Science of Human Flourishing" across three large, public, R1 universities in Fall 2018 participated in the study. Methods:…

We compared high school students' performance in a traditional comprehension assessment requiring them to identify key information and draw inferences from single texts, and a scenario-based assessment (SBA) requiring them to integrate, evaluate and apply information across multiple sources. Both assessments focused on a non-academic topic.…

We describe here lessons learned in designing an early algebra curriculum to measure early algebra's impact on children's algebra readiness for middle grades. The curriculum was developed to supplement regular mathematics instruction in Grades K-5. Lessons learned centered around the importance of several key factors, including using conceptual…

Lower division engineering courses are important yet hard to teach as many students find these highly abstracted material hard to comprehend. Recent studies have suggested that flipped classroom teaching has potential to improve the teaching and learning of lower division engineering courses. While some educators are optimistic about the potential…

To efficiently create books and other instructional content from videos and further improve accessibility of our course content we needed to solve the scene detection (SD) problem for engineering educational content. We present the pedagogical applications of extracting video images for the purposes of digital book generation and other shareable…

Background/Context: The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004) requires that all students with disabilities (SWD) receive a free, appropriate public education designed to meet their unique needs to prepare them for post-school education and employment (American Psychological Association, 2018). In the past two decades, momentum…

This paper responds to a 2016 systematic literature review of the research on learning games by Ke (2016). The review paper unpacked the idea of intrinsic integration in learning games, analyzing important emergent themes. The key ideas and the value of this review are discussed in the context of the recent shift to virtual instruction. The…

Many studies investigating inquiry learning in science domains have appeared over the years. Throughout this period, inquiry learning has been regularly criticized by scholars who favor direct instruction over inquiry learning. In this vein, Zhang, Kirschner, Cobern, and Sweller (2022) recently asserted that direct instruction is overall superior…

Utility-value interventions, in which students are asked to make connections between course material and their lives, are useful for improving students' academic outcomes in science courses. These interventions are thought to be successful in part because the intervention activities afford students autonomy while they complete them, but no…

Students' success in undergraduate STEM courses requires effective studying behavior, but also the motivation to enact it. Promoting students' achievement in STEM has commonly focused on either study strategies (cognitive) or motivational interventions; we hypothesized that combinations of these would be more effective. Using a Learning Management…

In this paper, we propose a computational approach to model the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) using predicted probabilities of correctness and engaging students in reflective dialogue. To that end, we employ a predictive model that uses a linear function of a variety of parameters, including difficulty and student knowledge and we analyze the…