Learning science requires higher-level (critical) thinking skills that need to be practiced in science classes. This study tested the effect of exam format on critical-thinking skills. Multiple-choice (MC) testing is common in introductory science courses, and students in these classes tend to associate memorization with MC questions and may not see the need to modify their study strategies for...

The goal of this session is to provide guidance to medical physicists undergoing the American Board of Radiology certification process in therapeutic medical physics. This panel discussion will focus on parts 2 (computer-based) and 3 (oral) of the examination. Unlike the latter portions of the exam which are specialty-driven, part 1 is universal for all medical physics fields and will not be ad...

In this paper we show how the deployment of a lightweight note sharing system can restore the antique social vocation of annotations in the classroom. The system was designed for the classroom context and evaluated through a longitudinal study lasting for an academic semester and involving 20 participants, enrolled in a Master-level course in computer science. Three key findings emerged. First,...

The text analyzes the path of the education in nursing in Brazil and analyzes the trends of the diploma courses (1991-2004) and describes a profile of the nursing graduation students that participated in the National Exam of Courses (ENADE), in 2004. To draw the referred profile 18 partner-family indicators and the respondents of the student's questionnaire academics they used. Some perspective...

Exposure to long-term stress has a variety of consequences on the brain and cognition. Few studies have examined the influence of long-term stress on event related potential (ERP) indices of error processing. The current study investigated how long-term academic stress modulates the error related negativity (Ne or ERN) and the error positivity (Pe) components of error processing. Forty-one male...

To support introductory Java programming students in preparing for their exams, we developed Knowledge Maximizer as a concept-based problem sequencing tool that considers a fine-grained concept-level model of student knowledge accumulated over the semester and attempts to bridge the possible knowledge gaps in the most efficient way. This paper presents the sequencing approach behind the Knowled...

This study examined the neural dynamics of working memory (WM) processing under long-term stress. Forty participants who had been exposed to a long period of major exam preparation (six months) and twenty-one control participants performed a numerical n-back task (n = 1, 2) while electroencephalograms were recorded. Psychological and endocrinal measurements confirmed significantly higher levels...