Being a teacher or a student in a class with a large enrollment can be intimidating. Often, teachers view comforts that are common to small classes as unattainable in a larger class, including knowing students' names, using active learning, employing group work, and creating group discussion. Students in large classes may find that the class size…

Most introductory courses are held in large lecture halls, with students typically sitting in either the front, middle, or back of the classroom. In a mixed-methods study of student attendance, performance, and seat choice, we found that students who chose to sit behind their peers performed nearly a full grade level worse than their peers who sat…

As videos have become one of the most common content delivery formats for online learning, tutorial-style videos have shown positive influences on student learning. Tutorial-style videos feature a tutoring session between an instructor and a student and can be used for online or flipped classroom teaching. However, past studies have been…

In a partially flipped, hybrid introductory physics course where students had a free choice between attending any lecture session in person or via video conferencing, and where recordings of the lecture sessions were made available for asynchronous viewing, a total of 16 learner attributes and their relationships were investigated. Five of these…

With the shift to online learning, many instructors have been forced into course delivery that involves educational lecture videos. There are a number of different elements that impact the quality of educational videos and overall student experience (e.g. instructor eye gaze, audio levels, screen sizing). More specifically, research has…

Various studies empirically proved the value of highly informative feedback for enhancing learner success. However, digital educational technology has yet to catch up as automated feedback is often provided shallowly. This paper presents a case study on implementing a pipeline that provides German-speaking university students enrolled in an…

We show how learning can be improved, beyond that shown in actively taught classrooms, by also transforming the homework using the principles of deliberate practice. We measure the impact of transforming the homework on student learning in a course that had already implemented an active approach to teaching in class. We compare performance on the…

This study investigated the effects of retrieval practice on the cognitive and metacognitive learning outcome in a psychology lecture at university. In a within-subjects design, N = 180 students completed an intermediate knowledge test in the 9th session and a final test in the 13th session of the semester. Both tests assessed students'…

Many students who enroll in introductory statistics courses do not have positive attitudes about the subject. A 2012 wide-ranging study by Schau and Emmioglu showed that student attitudes do not tend to improve after completing an introductory statistics course. However, there is a need for more studies about attitudes in introductory statistics…

This study examines the interest, motivation, and behavioral engagement of college students in an introductory course relative to three instructional formats used in the course: hands-on, problem-based laboratory stations; problem-based written case studies; and video lectures. Groups of five to seven students were assigned learning activities as…

Over the course of instruction, not only does most introductory physics students' content knowledge evolve but their attitudes and approaches to problem solving are also likely to evolve. This change may depend on many factors including the curricula and pedagogies used, the degree to which instruction actively engages students in the learning…

This study analyzes the types of peer discussion that occur during lecture-based tutorial sessions. It focuses in particular on whether discussions of this kind have certain characteristics that might indicate success in the post-testing phase. The data were collected during an introductory physics course. The main data set was gathered with the…

The Decoding the Disciplines methodology aims to teach students to think like experts in discipline-specific tasks. The central aspect of the methodology is to identify a bottleneck in the course content: a particular topic that a substantial number of students struggle to master. The current study compared the efficacy of standard lecture and…

Abundant research leaves little question that pedagogical approaches involving active student engagement with the material, and opportunities for student-to-student discussions, lead to much better learning outcomes than traditional instructor-led, expository instructional formats, in physics and in many other fields. In introductory college…

This study investigated the role of a new paradigm in teaching large introductory, fundamental engineering mechanics (IFEM) courses that combined student-centered learning pedagogies and supplemental learning resources. Demographic characteristics in this study included a total of 405 students, of whom 347 (85.7%) are males and 58 are (14.3%)…