Discussions have recently intensified regarding how to curtail the disturbingly high amount of sexual assaults that occur each year on U.S. College and university campuses. One suggestion to assist in the reduction of these crimes would be to allow students to carry concealed weapons as a means of self-protection. Considering the current culture…

Background: High-stakes assessments, such the Graduate Records Examination, have transitioned from paper to computer administration. Low-stakes research-based assessments (RBAs), such as the Force Concept Inventory, have only recently begun this transition to computer administration with online services. These online services can simplify…

Veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation New Dawn enrolled in postsecondary education may experience disabilities that impact their successful participation in the academic environment. Accommodations are made available to college students with disabilities to provide opportunities for success in this…

Student learning in instructional physics labs represents a growing area of research that includes investigations of students' beliefs and expectations about the nature of experimental physics. To directly probe students' epistemologies about experimental physics and support broader lab transformation efforts at the University of Colorado Boulder…

Background: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has proposed modifying the Nutrition Facts Label (NFL) on food packages to increase consumer attention to this resource and to promote healthier dietary choices. Aims: The present study sought to determine whether the proposed NFL changes will affect consumer attention to the NFL or purchase…

Free-response research-based assessments, like the Colorado Upper-division Electrostatics Diagnostic (CUE), provide rich, fine-grained information about students' reasoning. However, because of the difficulties inherent in scoring these assessments, the majority of the large-scale conceptual assessments in physics are multiple choice. To increase…

This study shows that the presence of a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state--the sense that a word is in memory when its retrieval fails--is used as a heuristic for inferring that an inaccessible word has characteristics that are consistent with greater word perceptibility. When reporting a TOT state, people judged an unretrieved word as more likely to…

This study investigated how three factors impacted performance on cost-volume-profit homework problems: language, formula use, and instruction. Students enrolled in Introduction to Financial Accounting (the first principles of accounting course) and Managerial Accounting (the second principles of accounting course) from eight different US colleges…

Poverty has been linked to reduced workforce opportunities, reduced college-going rates, increased social-emotional challenges, and even negative health consequences. Postsecondary educational opportunities, offered during high school, that contribute to the acquisition of social capital may improve academic outcomes for students from impoverished…

General biology courses (for majors) are often transferred from one institution to another. These courses must prepare students for upper division courses in biology. In Colorado, a Biology Transfer Articulation Agreement that includes general biology has been created across the state. An evaluation was conducted of course grades in two upper…

As part of an ongoing investigation of students' learning in first semester upper-division quantum mechanics, we needed a high-quality conceptual assessment instrument for comparing outcomes of different curricular approaches. The process of developing such a tool started with converting a preliminary version of a 14-item open-ended quantum…

This report is based on a series of presentations at the second CLIR Seminar on "Participatory Design of Academic Libraries," held at the University of Rochester's River Campus June 5-7, 2013. Participatory design is a relatively recent approach to understanding library user behavior. It is based on techniques used in anthropological and…

During the summer of 2012, the Louisiana State University (LSU) field camp program was affected by close proximity to the large Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado Springs, CO, as well as by a fire incident on the field camp property. A mapping exercise was created that incorporated spatial data acquired on the LSU property to investigate research…

Course management software enables faculty members to learn one software package for web-based curriculum, assessment, synchronous and asynchronous discussions, collaborative work, multimedia and interactive resource development. There are as many as 109 different course management software packages on the market and several studies have evaluated…