Prior research suggests most students do not glean valid cues from provided visuals, resulting in reduced metacomprehension accuracy. Across 4 experiments, we explored how the presence of instructional visuals affects students' metacomprehension accuracy and cue-use for different types of metacognitive judgments. Undergraduates read texts on…

Student-study behaviors and metacognition are predictors of student-academic success. However, student metacognitive evaluation of their own study habit behavior use has been largely unexplored. To address this gap, we gave students enrolled in three different Biology courses (n = 1140) a survey that asked them to identify the study behaviors used…

Traditional exam reviews are passive and face many challenges to prepare students for exams. In this study, we proposed the Tab-Meta Key model, which emphasizes five major factors (time, accountability, big picture, key concepts, and metacognition) and is supported by prior literature. We also designed an exam review based on this model. This exam…

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,…

Undergraduate STEM lecture courses enroll hundreds who must master declarative, conceptual, and applied learning objectives. To support them, instructors have turned to active learning designs that require students to engage in "self-regulated learning" (SRL). Undergraduates struggle with SRL, and universities provide courses, workshops,…

This study investigates associations between two types of control beliefs--self-efficacy for self-regulation and implicit theories of willpower--and undergraduate biology students' (N = 535) behavioral self-regulation and performance. Findings suggest that self-efficacy is the more proximally related motive for students to engage in academic…

Asking questions can be one of the most difficult, yet important, steps in driving student inquiry. As post-secondary instructors work to integrate inquiry into classrooms, very few concrete strategies exist for developing and promoting student questioning. The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) is a structured process used widely in K-12…

Previous research has shown that the use of clickers in the classroom enhances student engagement. However, few studies have investigated how the type of clicker question may influence learning outcomes. To explore this, we compared the effects of lower-order cognitive skill (LOCS) and higher-order cognitive skill (HOCS) clicker questions on later…

In this industrial revolution era, university-level education emphasises higher-order thinking skills. This research aims to analyse the effect of implementing the PjB-HOTS learning model on cognitive learning, creative thinking skills, analytical thinking skills, and metacognitive skills of the students studying osmoregulation concepts in Animal…

The field of biology is becoming increasingly fragmented, and this fragmentation spills over into the ways our students think and learn about biology. Biology education policy documents stress the importance of teaching biology in an integrated manner and call for the biology education research community to establish a unifying paradigm for the…

Retrieval practice enhances the learning of educational materials, and prior work has shown that practicing retrieval can enhance learning as much as or more than creating concept maps. Few studies have combined retrieval practice with other learning activities, and no prior work has explored whether concept mapping and retrieval practice might…

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…

Mental health challenges have been rising across college campuses. To destigmatize wellness practices and promote student mental health, we present a novel technical project in an introductory bioengineering course that explores stress management techniques through physiology, biosensors, and design. We hypothesize that if students measure…

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…

In this study, we propose an 'Approach to Modeling' (AtM) framework for examining how undergraduates approach tasks that require modelling scientific phenomena. Our framework is adapted from Approach to Learning (AtL) theories and consists of three observable behavioural constructs: metacognition, generative thinking, and causal reasoning. Twenty…