As organizing bodies for discipline communities, academic associations can help to galvanize, facilitate, and scale efforts to improve undergraduate STEM instruction. Rebecca Griffiths conducted a study exploring the ways in which academic associations have engaged with undergraduate education, how they are organized to pursue this part of their…

The rising cost of higher education has led parents, employers, and politicians to question the need for a college degree. Skills Infusion is a professional development program in which faculty review a course they teach to identify the career readiness competencies defined by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). The NACE…

The public sector gets through a big transformation in many dimensions lately. The volume and extent of this transformation influence institutionalization, organization, and execution of the public sector as a whole, irrespective of either a developed or a developing country case is at stake. There is a growing inclination to capture and direct…

Sci-fi has the power to open dialogue because its alternate world-building enables students to feel far enough from reality to discuss social problems unreservedly. In this essay, I review an assignment I developed using "Black Mirror" and "Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams" that present episodes in which militarized policing,…

Background: Teaching-focused faculty positions have grown in popularity in higher education and provide novel opportunities to transform undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. The University of California (UC) system employs a unique teaching-focused faculty position, officially called the Lecturer with…

Interaction is an essential component of learning environments and necessary for student learning. The three main types of interaction are Learner-Instructor (LI), Learner-Content (LC), and Learner-Learner (LL). This article, the second in a three-part series, addresses LC interaction and uses an undergraduate fitness and physical activity course…

As sport instructors prepare students for the industry through experiential activities and incorporating in-the-moment sport topics, the use of backward design allows for the desired goals and outcomes to drive the instruction (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998, 2005). In addition to backward design being applied in sport courses, the design has been…

The interaction between dentists and patients has been a common issue. Nevertheless, the study regarding the Critical Discourse Analysis on utterances used by dentists when taking care of patients remains unknown. This study aims to discover: (1) the experience of fresh-graduate dentists in learning how to interact or communicate with patients in…

This Focus On uses data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) to showcase that, as a group, recipients of physics bachelor's degrees tend to do well on two prominent standardized tests for medical school and law school admission. Although only a small percent of the physics bachelor's…

Colleges and universities are increasingly under pressure to prepare students for professional success after graduation, and, at the same time, are facing calls to enhance student civic learning and to contribute to their local communities. High-impact practices have been embraced as pedagogical approaches to address these goals. In particular,…

How does leadership emerge and develop among university STEM faculty working to adopt evidence-based teaching practices? This qualitative case study examines academic departments as sites for instructional change, viewing leadership as an emergent property of the relationships within a social system. The researcher adopted a dual lens of McElroy…

This study sought to examine the instructional practices of faculty noted for exemplary teaching to identify support systems that help students succeed. Based on attrition reports across postsecondary institutions that show approximately one-fourth of students who leave college before degree attainment, finding solutions that can help students…

Students across Pennsylvania are demonstrating an inability to meet proficiency expectations in reading. Emphasis has been on schools of education as one originating source of difficulty with reading instruction. Five universities and colleges in Pennsylvania were analyzed utilizing document analysis of undergraduate course syllabi, schedules, and…

A student experiment that uses QuEChERS (quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, and safe) methodology for extraction and HPLC for quantitative determination of tocopherols from seeds and nuts is described here. Chromatographic separation is achieved by using a pentafluorophenyl stationary phase which gives enhanced separation of the tocopherols…

The laboratory experiment presented here describes the use of a calcium ion-selective electrode (Ca-ISE) to determine the concentration of zinc in a supplement tablet. This approach was developed to show students how to expand the range of applications of Ca-ISE to enable the determination of metal ions other than Ca[superscript 2+]. To determine…