Over the last few years, Texas, Connecticut, and California have led the way in approving courses in ethnic studies to provide high school students with engaging, culturally relevant instruction. Texas blazed the trail in 2018 when its state board of education approved an elective course in Mexican American studies. Then in April 2020, the board…

The COVID-19 pandemic made it necessary for instructors to innovate, and some of the innovations will persist and be refined post-pandemic. An economics elective at Claremont McKenna College provides examples. Innovations likely to persist include replacing in-class exams with context-rich assignments and conducting a set of student presentations…

Classroom space limitations and increasing student enrollments push universities to the development of alternative course delivery models. The authors describe how a high-enrollment, general elective course was converted into a HyFlex model. A HyFlex course provides flexible participation, allowing students the choice of attending face-to-face…

Intercultural competence--the ability to successfully interact and communicate sensitively with members of other cultural groups--is an essential skill in multicultural societies and an increasingly globalized world. A quasi-experimental study revealed that completing a cross-cultural international psychology course increased college students'…

Online teaching is growing in popularity. This paper presents a case study for an online business course investigating student exam scores obtained from non-randomized and randomized exams. We find that the non-randomized exam scores of the students are suspicious because there are statistically significant disparities from the randomized exam…

In an effort to align its college admission requirements with the new K-12 science standards, the University of California (UC) recently proposed to increase its high school science admissions eligibility requirement--known as area D--from two to three years. UC's new policy has the potential of improving student science learning and readiness for…

Microfluidics involves the study of the behavior of fluids at microscale, fluid manipulations, and the design of the devices that can effectively perform such manipulations. We are developing two new elective courses to include microfluidics in our curriculum at CSULB. Herein, we present the results of the first course, Microfabrication and…

This study employed a quasi-experimental design to examine the effects of a school-based youth participatory action research program on the education outcomes of participating high school students. The program was a year-long elective course in six high schools in the same California district whose student population is predominantly low-income…

With a background in the teaching of Spanish in the US and the teaching of English abroad, the authors had spent a great deal of time contemplating both linguistic diversity and the internationalization of college campuses. Considering that we found ourselves studying TESOL and had an opportunity to design our own English language course for…

The majority of public high school students in California are missing out on history. Many students may not see it that way, but that is because they have little understanding of what it means to appreciate history. The traditional high school history survey courses, US History and world history, provide an overview of "everything that ever…

It is predicted that Hispanic school-aged children will outnumber non-Hispanic white students in public schools by 2050 (Wolf, Herman, & Dietel, 2010). While the number of Latino English language learners (ELLs) continues to grow, their educational achievement remains problematic. Data reveal that ELL dropout, mobility, and poverty rates are…

Black Women in America is an upper-division elective course for students majoring in African American or women's studies at California State University Fullerton (CSUF). The author has taught this course at CSUF at least once a year since 2002 and have changed the course readings, lectures, and assignments on a regular basis. In April 2007,…

Research has shown that involvement in campus activities leads to student development and learning. Student development and learning enhances leadership skills and abilities. Leadership skills for young people may be essential in order for them to feel like contributing members of society. Further, student leadership programs assist in shaping a…

The new faces on the help desk are younger, work for cheap, and may be the tech savviest in the building. This article describes how two IT training programs are teaching students valuable technology skills while providing schools with a much-needed lift to their troubleshooting teams. The programs--Generation YES and Mouse Squad--put students at…

Teachers often find themselves lamenting the loss of emergent readers to video games, television, and, most recently, the TTYL (talk/type to you later) culture of text messaging and Internet social networking. Trying to impart the joy of a good read to middle school students feels like pushing religion onto the perfectly content worshipers of…