This article provides instructors with guidelines for teaching simple experimental design for the comparison of two treatment groups. Two designs with specific examples are discussed along with common misconceptions that undergraduate students typically bring to the experiment design process. Features of experiment design that maximize power and minimize the effects of interindividual variation...

A common refrain heard from many college and university biology instructors is that undergraduate science students do not seem to possess the same scientific habits of mind as their instructors, nor do they seem to have command of fundamental principles and concepts that structure the expertise of their instructors (Hestenes et al., 1992; Khodor et al., 2004; Wilson et al., 2006; Michael, 2007;...

With minimal training in assessment design, professors must generate high quality examinations that fairly assess student accomplishment of course objectives. Multiple choice questions are frequently used for this assessment, but often do not address learning objectives, are misinterpreted, and if reused, may challenge the integrity of some students. It is proposed that computer aids for genera...

In an introductory Engineering course with an annual enrollment of over 1000 students, a professor has little option but to rely on multiple choice exams for midterms and finals. Furthermore, the teaching assistants are too overloaded to give detailed feedback on submitted homework assignments. We introduce Mechanix, a computer-assisted tutoring system for engineering students. Mechanix uses re...

A total of 358 participants from 52 schools joined the 3-day training program of the P.A.T.H.S. Project in Hong Kong. At the end of training, participants were invited to respond to a subjective outcome evaluation questionnaire (31 structured items and two open-ended questions). The results based on the qualitative analysis of the participants' responses to the two open-ended questions showed t...

Training and mentorlng Graduate Student Instructors (GS Instructors) at large institutions presents three challenges to instructional developers: 1) training numerous GSInstructors from multipledepartments. 2) the vastarray ofduties GS Instructors needtrainingin. and3) thecontinualsophistication ofGS Instructors. Here wedescribe howthe College ofEngineering at the University ofMichigan has met ...

Learning student names has been promoted as an inclusive classroom practice, but it is unknown whether students value having their names known by an instructor. We explored this question in the context of a high-enrollment active-learning undergraduate biology course. Using surveys and semistructured interviews, we investigated whether students perceived that instructors know their names, the i...

When facilitating asynchronous discussion forums, should online instructors be encouraged to take a prominent ‘sage on the stage’ role, a more constructivist ‘guide on the side’ role, or an ultra low profile as ‘the ghost in the wings’? There is no shortage of anecdotal advice on how to conduct discussion forums in online education, but there appears to be very little research available so far ...

Digital forensics can be a difficult discipline to teach effectively because of its interdisciplinary nature, closely integrating law and computer science. Prior research in Physics and Computer Science has shown that the traditional lecture approach is inadequate for the task of provoking students’ thought-processes and systematically engaging them in problem-solving during class. Peer instruc...

We present RACE, a new dataset for benchmark evaluation of methods in the reading comprehension task. Collected from the English exams for middle and high school Chinese students in the age range between 12 to 18, RACE consists of near 28,000 passages and near 100,000 questions generated by human experts (English instructors), and covers a variety of topics which are carefully designed for eval...