In a 1984 essay, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago, asserted that tutoring offered "the best learning conditions we can devise" and that tutors could raise student achievement by two full standard deviations--or, in statistical parlance, two "sigmas." The influence of Bloom's two-sigma…

Background: With the rapid proliferation of online education, it is incumbent upon teachers to find ways to provide online students with science laboratory experiences. Existing research on online labs focuses heavily on computer-supported inquiry learning environments, such as virtual laboratories and remote laboratories. There are limited…

Although medical students learn human anatomy within a social network of friends/classmates, limited research has examined how social network structure is related to student's performance in human anatomy examinations. This study aimed to examine the association between centrality (i.e., the degree to which a student is connected to other students…

Aimed to adapt the experimental teaching to keeping up with the actual application of the experimental scene, an experimental teaching based on virtual-real combination for mobile communication was proposed in this article, which realized the collaborative mode of combining online virtual operations and real operations. The virtual experiments…

The purpose of this quantitative pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study was to examine the effect on student success rates in biology courses with laboratory components taken via distance education at a California community college. This study examined success rates for nine different courses, including 98 sections (2,299 students) taught only…

The main objective of this intervention study was to investigate the effect of three teaching approaches, namely the traditional teaching method (TTM), a teacher-based demonstration experiment (TBDE) and a student hands-on experiment (SHE), on students' academic performance. A total number of 324 senior five students studying chemistry as one of…

The students following Engineering disciplines should acquire a conceptual understanding of the concepts and the processors and attitudes. There are two recognizable learning environments for students: classroom and laboratory environments. With the COVID-19 Pandemic, both environments merged to online environments, impacting students' processes…

Motivation, belonging, and inclusion are all critical factors for student success but can be difficult to support in asynchronous online courses. Active learning and required group work have been shown to increase student motivation in in-person and synchronous online courses, but little is known about their impact in online asynchronous settings.…

This study investigates students' motivation during experimentation in geography lessons by implementing a newly developed experimental kit on soils (GeoBox) in Germany. The study focuses on a first evaluation by means of a one-group pretest/posttest design. Fifth-grade students (N = 166) answered a questionnaire pertaining to regular geography…

In the sciences, the laboratory is one of the most impactful spaces for student learning, engagement, and experience. Prior knowledge gleaned during lecture and laboratory discussion (i.e., a course section designed to further emphasize conceptual content underlying experiments and inform students about laboratory procedures or safety precautions)…

Distance education programs have become the preferred option for most higher education institutions to continue teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the effectiveness of some online courses, especially those engineering courses with experimentation activities, remains disputed. The main challenge is fostering collaborative problem solving…

The ability to make informed decisions is a skill considered as one of the 21st century skills and is crucial as part of the critical thinking and problem-solving process in science and engineering. Despite its importance, students (e.g., beginning designers) often struggle with making informed design decisions that are well supported by relevant…

The paper compares the effectiveness of in-person and virtual engineering laboratory sessions. The in-person and virtual laboratory sessions reported here comprise six experiments combined with short tutorials. The virtual lab combined enquiry-based learning and gamification principles. The integration of the virtual labs with in-person teaching…

Background: Achieving the targeted of university physics courses and improving student motivation requires varying types of instructional design. One alternative approach to the traditional lecture format involves the use of historical science stories, which are narratives that present episodes from the life of a scientist, as well as…

This paper presents an analysis of cognitive skill levels expressed in high school students' performance using laboratory simulations. We address lower-order cognitive skills (LOCS) and higher-order cognitive skills (HOCS) situations in a virtual simulation activity, in order to identify and underly further discussions about students' reasoning…