Students and faculty have disparate opinions on how complete lecture materials should be to optimize learning. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of lecture handout completeness and content area on Doctor of Physical Therapy student recall/retention in foundation level courses. These findings suggest there may not be a best…

Undergraduate science education curricula are traditionally composed of didactic instruction with a small number of laboratory courses that provide introductory training in research techniques. Research on learning methodologies suggests this model is relatively ineffective, whereas participation in independent research projects promotes enhanced…

This study reports the results of the first systematic investigation into Astro 101 students' conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. We developed four surveys with which we measured students' conceptual knowledge of the Big Bang, the expansion and evolution of the universe, and the evidence for dark matter. Our classical test theory…

As educators, the authors continually strive to improve the quality of time spent in class with their students. As chemistry teachers, they know that lectures are necessary to convey content, but experiential learning is more effective at constructing and solidifying knowledge. Podcasting and vodcasting their lessons at first proved to be an…

As a new generation of learners enters higher education classrooms, effective teaching strategies must adapt to match their learning styles. This research explored student and teacher perceptions of effectiveness of teaching methods, with particular comparison between techniques emphasizing community versus individual learning. Fifteen psychology…

Student success in solving physics problems is related to the representational format of the problem. We study student representational competence in two large-lecture algebra-based introductory university physics courses with approximately 600 participants total. We examined student performance on homework problems given in four different…