Virtual worlds are increasingly popular in educational settings. In order to further usefulness in providing a laboratory education, almost 300 students participated in a study to determine the relative learning gains and attitudes related to performing two chemistry experiments in either the virtual world of Second Life (SL) or a real world…

To learn content knowledge in science, technology, engineering, and math domains, students need to make connections among visual representations. This article considers two kinds of connection-making skills: (1) "sense-making skills" that allow students to verbally explain mappings among representations and (2) "perceptual…

This study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of student-generated videos as a supplement to teaching assistant (TA) instruction in an undergraduate organic chemistry laboratory. Three videos covering different aspects of lab instruction (experimental technique, use of instrumentation, and calculations) were produced using…

Lab instructors, for both high school and undergraduate college level courses, face issues of constricted time within the lab period and limited student engagement with prelab materials. To address these issues, an online prelab delivery system named LabLessons is developed and tested out in a high school chemistry classroom. The system…

This paper examines an experiment conducted at a 2-year college with non-majors. The Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique (IFAT) is a cross between a lottery scratch ticket and a scantron form which was designed to replace scantrons (EpsteinEducation.com). Using the IFAT in an unconventional way (reviewing class material), we expected to find…

An experiment was conducted in which the face-name mnemonic was applied to the task of associating 14 artists' names with two styles of their artwork, portraits and thematic paintings. Following study of the 28 items, mnemonic students outperformed "own best method" control students on both immediate and delayed matching tests. Further,…

According to the views of social constructivism, learning takes place when individuals engage socially to talk about and act on shared problems or interests. In recent years, this approach has been very popular for the teaching and learning of mathematics in primary and secondary education. On the contrary, in tertiary education, it seems that…

With a view to enhancing the entrepreneurial activity of universities, the authors explore the concepts and features of the "experimental lab", presenting it as an effective means of supporting entrepreneurial training programmes and helping students to turn ideas into actual start-ups. In this context, the term experimental lab refers…

Connection-making among multiple representations is a crucial but difficult competence in STEM learning. Prior research has focused on one type of learning process involved in connection-making: sense-making processes leading to conceptual understanding of connections. Yet, other research suggests that a second type of learning process is…

Reliable, consistent assessment process that produces comparable assessment grades between assessors and institutions is a core activity and an ongoing challenge with which universities have failed to come to terms. In this paper, we report results from an experiment that tests the impact of an intervention designed to reduce grader variability…

Connection-making among multiple representations is a crucial but difficult competence in STEM learning. Prior research has focused on one type of learning process involved in connection-making: sense-making processes leading to conceptual understanding of connections. Yet, other research suggests that a second type of learning process is…

Performance on verbal and mathematical tasks is enhanced when participants shift from using algorithms to retrieving information directly from memory (Siegler, 1988a). However, it is unknown whether a shift to retrieval is involved in dynamic spatial skill acquisition. For example, do athletes mentally extrapolate the trajectory of the ball, or do…

A shortcoming of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is the lack of substantive integration of hands-on activities into online classrooms. We conducted a randomised control trial (RCT) in a MOOC where we sent the treatment group at-home lab kits with which they could perform experiments in their own homes. In our intervention research, we found…

Present article provides the definition of the concept of "teacher's readiness for using virtual educational environment in credit educational technology". We defined the criterions and development levels of college teacher's readiness for using virtual educational environment, which are represented by three components - motivational,…

Source-based essays are evaluated both on the quality of the writing and the content appropriate interpretation and use of source material. Hence, composing a high-quality source-based essay (an essay written based on source material) relies on skills related to both reading (the sources) and writing (the essay) skills. As such, source-based…