Studies show only 20 to 40 percent of students read assigned texts and are prepared for class discussions. To address this issue we created the "3-2-1 Reading Assignment," in which students engage in critical reading and deep learning by providing "three" points that summarize the text, "two" points that analyze it,…

Students hold foundational assumptions that interact with information they are introduced to in college. By learning to identify, assess, and restructure these foundational ideas, students' ability to acquire topical knowledge improves. This article presents a format for teaching students how to evaluate their beliefs through four levels of…

Students have gravitated toward the convenience of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate text, music, and for entertainment. Faculty are also emerging as AI consumers. Given that faculty workloads have become increasingly difficult to manage, AI holds promise for assisting with teaching and research. In this article, a pedagogical case study is…

Mind mapping can be a pedagogical tool that helps students brainstorm how to organize information in a way that incorporates creative and active learning, as well as critical thinking. In this article, we describe the application of using mind maps in an undergraduate course focused on teaching leadership theory as an effort to help students think…

Critical thinking is essential in academia and the workforce. Although writing can be used as a pedagogical tool for fostering deeper subject matter understanding, increased retention, and critical thinking, relatively few science courses are writing based. This writing-based introductory science course provided an opportunity for students to…

This experimental field study (pre-post-follow-up design) with 184 student teachers examined the effectiveness of an intervention to reduce misconceptions about psychology within an introductory psychology course. For this purpose, over the course's one-semester duration, all students attended six lectures and, in addition, worked individually on…

Writing Intensive (WR) High Impact Practice (HIP), which incorporates Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT), was applied to written assignments in Human Biology and Anatomy and Physiology II (A&P II) courses. As part of our study sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), certified AAC&U Valid…

In this research, pre-service science teachers' writings written in a biology laboratory course were examined and the development of writings skills was monitored from the critical thinking skills perspective. In this context, the preservice teachers were asked to design and build a fully enclosed ecosystem model (bottle ecosystem), collect data…

Recent research has shown a great interest in supporting self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies in online learning. However, there is hardly any study that has investigated how students' self-regulation of behavior could be promoted in online environments for programming learning and assessment, despite the proliferation of automated programming…

Sociology instructors have long used nontraditional texts such as literary fiction to demonstrate core course concepts, increase student engagement, and develop students' critical thinking in the classroom. In this article, I explore how written assignments structured around identifying core course concepts in a dystopian novel that connects to…

The Dialectical Map (DMap) is an open-source, web-based argument visualization tool developed and used at a Canadian University to scaffold argument construction. To illustrate the ways that argument mapping can be used in undergraduate courses, this article presents five cases selected from courses in biology, psychology, computing science, and…

Background: Critical thinking is an important student learning outcome in all psychology courses and included in the American Psychological Association's (APA's) goals for the undergraduate major. Objective: The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of integrating a general model of critical thinking into the instruction,…

Higher education is working to diversify the undergraduate curriculum to support critical thinking and promote racial justice--pressing work, particularly at predominantly white colleges and universities. To support students' critical thinking, we need to better understand their awareness of systemic inequities as they enter and exit undergraduate…

This study investigates the effectiveness of implementing clicker-based activities to promote critical thinking in a small-enrollment undergraduate psychology course. Students' performance on knowledge-based tests and critical-thinking assignments were analyzed. Whereas no significant difference was observed in their knowledge-based exam…

Collaborative writing assignments are an essential element of teaching technical and professional writing, and they should be included in online writing instruction (OWI). The COVID-19 pandemic was a drastic interruption of regular teaching practices that had the potential of derailing the practice of assigning online collaborative writing…