The current work reports the results of students' social presence in web-based discussions for their conceptual learning of organic chemistry. The results in this study were collected from the examined students-students, students-instructor, and students-learning materials interactions via the designed web-based discussion. We created an online…

Supplemental instruction using peer leaders can assist student learning in undergraduate STEM courses, but optional sessions are not well attended. This study compared attendance in peer leader sessions, nonproductive grade rates, and student evaluation data across two Human Anatomy and Physiology I courses in two different years. One course…

Adult students 25 and older are a growing population at U.S. colleges and universities. Mathematics courses present a particular challenge for these students who may have less academic preparation than younger students and have experienced a significant time-lapse since their last formal mathematics instruction. This exploratory, qualitative study…

This research explores the perceptions of facilitators in asynchronous online discussion to improve practice and student engagement in Higher Education. Traditional didactic delivery of learning content may fail the expectations of student and academic stakeholders. The pressure to teach within constrained resources presents challenges, but also…

The importance of making online and distance education successful has been dramatically prioritized due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Student retention is a key performance indicator in online higher education. Evidence suggests that within online distance education the key to retaining students is to encourage an engaging and supportive online…

Using data from the 2009 Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership, this article examines the personal characteristics and environmental experiences that contribute to college students' involvement in social change. Results indicate that collegiate environmental characteristics (i.e., student group membership, leadership training, discussions…

Establishing a communication-rich classroom can be difficult. This article describes the process and findings of a practitioner action research study addressing the question of how teachers can interact with their students while they are working in groups to encourage and enhance student-to-student communication. Recommended research-based teacher…

This paper examines engagement with an online discussion forum, aiming to identify the different levels of participation and to investigate factors that encourage or discourage student participation. The case involved the posing of a short real-life problem via a forum on the university's virtual learning environment. An in-class survey was…

The purpose of this study was to modify the Student Course Engagement Questionnaire (SCEQ) for use in varied teaching settings, including online graduate courses. The SCEQ-M was administered to 276 students enrolled in a variety of graduate-level education and counseling courses during the Spring 2016 semester. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA)…

Enabling learning through meaningful classroom experiences has always been a challenge for teachers. Bringing about a balance of the "conceptual" and the "hands-on", along with contextual embeddedness in problem-solving situations, broadly characterises the experience of development and trials of three Design and Technology…

Each year students spend thousands of hours participating in discussion forums. Yet there has not been sufficient scholarship on the observable effects of discussion forums on learning outcomes, and there is not a clear understanding of the role discussion forums play in transmitting knowledge of course concepts to students. This study…

This study explored learning and teaching of online classes. Examining the relationship between undergraduate students' participation and their final grades in five selected courses in an online learning environment and exploring differences between the demographics characteristics of age, race, and gender to students' participation (total number…

This study compares the discussion participation and performance of 7 undergraduate students enrolled in an e-commerce programming course during the spring semester of 2010 to that of 13 students enrolled in the same course during fall of that year. In the former course, the instructor participated in the required discussion only at the very end…

The intent of the Florida College and Career Readiness Initiative (FCCRI) is to help students become college-ready by high school graduation, and subsequently to succeed in obtaining college credentials. This is done by testing college readiness in grade 11 and requiring that students testing below college-ready take college readiness and success…

The use of large online discussion forums within online and distance learning continues to grow. Recent innovations in online learning such as the MOOC (massive open online course) and concomitant growth in the use of online media for the delivery of courses in traditional campus based universities provide both opportunity and challenge for online…