Two studies examined student psychological need satisfaction as a predictor of positive teacher-course evaluations. In Study 1, 268 undergraduates recalled and rated the quality of a recent important college course, then rated their feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness within that course. Consistent with self-determination theory, all three ratings predicted instructor and/or cours...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to determine whether visual impairment and age affected driver performance and safety rated during in-traffic driving conditions. METHODS Participants included 30 younger, 25 middle-aged, and 35 older subjects with normal vision and 47 older subjects with visual impairment. All subjects were legally eligible to drive. Driving performance was assessed during i...

A large percentage of the population has a severe anxiety when it comes to public speaking. However, the current research shows that there are ways both instructor factors and classroom factors can be altered to make an individual less anxious about public speaking scenarios. This study seeks to understand the effects of classroom community and instructor nonverbal immediacy on public speaking ...

After the system database contains an accumulation of discussion messages with date tagged from different classes within a course, an instructor may want to have an overview of learners’ discussions, such as the top ten hot topics, without reading every message in the learning forum. Hence, it is necessary to model the relationships between discussion messages during a specific time interval fo...

Quantitative concept mapping, in contrast with qualitative approaches, is rigorous scientifically and permits statistical analyses of data about concept learning. This study extends past quantitative research on the structure of student concept learning in pulmonary physiology. Pathfinder scaling is used to derive concept maps for medical and veterinary students and their physiology instructors...

Four classes of the same Industrial Organization class were compared. The test group was taught by the instructor dressed in business attire, while the comparison group was taught by the instructor dressed casually. Results show that the attendance for test students was 8.50 percentage points higher than comparison students and this increase is associated with an improvement in their final exam...

Education of design engineering has started to change in response to the advancement of computer technology. This paper proposes a new design engineering educational framework using an e-learning system called ShareFast, a Semantic Web-based software for document management system with workflow. The software offers a function to keep tracks of learner’s behavior so that the instructor can analy...

Interest in conducting problem-based learning (PBL) on-line has increased to meet student and physician schedules. Little research describes skills needed to facilitate PBL on-line. In this paper we studied teaching presence in asynchronous PBL groups. Two raters, with average inter-rater agreements of 0.80, used an existing code to measure teaching presence in 62 PBL case discussions facilitat...

This study investigates student success in an online introductory statistics class. We examine the impact of several variables: amount of time that a student watches instructor-made videos (IMV), the nature of communication between the student and the instructor, and the amount of time spent on completing the online assignments and exams on student grades in an introductory level online statist...

Many engineering faculty believe that when students perceive a course to have a high workload, students will rate the course and the performance of the course instructor poorly. This belief can be particularly worrying to engineering faculty since engineering courses are often perceived as uniquely demanding. The present investigation demonstrated that student ratings of workload and of overall...