Students struggle to regulate their learning during independent study sessions. In this study, we ask whether an online behavioral intervention helped introductory students decrease distraction while studying. The intervention consisted of exam 1 reflection, exam 2 planning, and exam 2 reflection exercises. During planning, students formed a goal,…

Analogical reasoning is an important type of cognition often used by experts across domains. Little research, however, has investigated how generating analogies can support college students' self-regulated learning (SRL) of biology. This study therefore evaluated a contextualized cognitive learning strategy intervention designed to teach students…

Chronic poverty and stressful life circumstances result in poor school performance and behaviors. Research demonstrates that these behaviors are not the result of student inadequacies and lack of proper discipline, but are rather of neurological adaptations to chronic poverty and toxic stress. These outcomes are driven by the body's attempt to…

Metacognition--the processes whereby learners assess and monitor their progress in learning (metacognitive monitoring, MM) and use these judgements of learning to make choices about what to study in the future (metacognitive control, MC)--has been shown to be beneficial to learning. However, effective learning also relies on metacognitive…

The present study investigated the extent to which monitoring practice and timely monitoring feedback, contextualized in an online undergraduate biology course, improved students' metacognitive monitoring and learning outcomes. The intervention followed a true experimental design and randomly assigned 162 students into three conditions: a control…

Training in compassion can lead to an enhanced ability to tolerate distress, maintain focus, and discern clinical interventions for clients in a variety of clinical scenarios. Cultivating a compassionate stance provides the opportunity to engage clients with full attention and presence, allowing openness and receptivity for both the painful and…

College students' performance in introductory-level biology course work is an important predictor of ongoing persistence in the major. This study reports on a researcher-educator partnership that designed and compared two cocurricular workshops. Seventeen laboratory sections of an undergraduate biology course were randomly assigned to one of two…

Metacognitive ability is enormously important for improving students' learning performance. However, overconfidence bias may hinder students' metacognition abilities. Therefore, in this study, we conducted an intervention to reduce or debias overconfidence among students using the KAAR (knowledge, awareness, action, and reflection) model. Ninety…

Accurate self-evaluation is critical for learning. Calibration describes the relationship between learners' perception of their performance and their actual performance on a task. Here, we describe two studies aimed at assessing and improving student calibration in a first-semester introductory biology course at a 4-year public institution. Study…

Institutions have developed diverse approaches that vary in effectiveness and cost to improve student performance in introductory science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses. We developed a low-cost, graduate student-led, metacognition-based study skills course taught in conjunction with the introductory biology series at Miami…

This study describes the development and implementation of an iterative diagnostic and intervention routine designed to elicit and quantitatively describe aspects of student metacognition, affect, and study habits in a first-year undergraduate biology course. The Student Metacognition, Affect, and Study Habits (SMASH) inventory is a…

When undergraduate biology students learn to explain biological mechanisms, they face many challenges and may overestimate their understanding of living systems. Previously, we developed the MACH model of four components used by expert biologists to explain mechanisms: Methods, Analogies, Context, and How. This study explores the implementation of…

The relationship between early adversity and numerous negative outcomes across the lifespan is evident in a wide range of societies and cultures (e.g., Pakulak, Stevens, & Neville, 2018). Among the most affected neural systems are those supporting attention, self-regulation, and stress regulation. As such, these systems represent targets for…

Purpose of Study: The aim of this study is to investigate the nature of pre-service biology teachers' metaconceptual processes that were active as they participated in metaconceptual teaching activities. Methods: Several instructional activities, including poster drawing, concept mapping, group and class discussions, and journal writing, were…

Promoting preservice science teachers' experimentation competency is required to provide a basis for meaningful learning through experiments in schools. However, preservice teachers show difficulties when experimenting. Previous research revealed that cognitive scaffolding promotes experimentation competency by structuring the learning process,…