Introductory College-level Course Research Articles

The Relationship Between Course Structure and Intensity, and Student Success in Developmental Education

Texas legislation mandated that colleges offer developmental education using a corequisite model, where students concurrently enroll in introductory college-level courses with supplemental developmental support. Using data from the population of Texas students in developmental education, we estimated regression models to investigate differential relationships between corequisite characteristics and outcomes, both overall and by student characteristics. Our findings suggest there is no single “magic bullet” course structure that is universally more effective, as relationships between the reform and student success vary by subject and student subgroup. Additionally, even a single credit of corequisite developmental support can be beneficial for some students, potentially more so than traditional three-credit courses.

Enhancing student engagement with introductory microbiology and immunology topics using a novel board game.

In introductory microbiology courses for non-biology majors, it can be difficult to ensure that students gain a functional understanding of the interplay between the host immune system and an invading infectious agent. Immune Battle is a board game that allows students to explore pathogen evolution and the immune system's response to incursions in a captivating way, leveraging battleship and worker placement styles of gameplay. Students play in teams as either a pathogenic microbe attempting to reproduce and transmit itself to new hosts or as the immune system trying to defend the host from infection. Immune Battle seeks to mimic real-world interactions between immune cells and microbes using board game mechanics. For example, students will quickly find that adaptive immune system actions are better at fighting off microbial incursions than innate immune actions but require more time to activate. In this way, Immune Battle reinforces student's understanding of the immune system and pathogenic virulence in an exciting and interactive way that keeps them thinking about host defenses long after the end of the class period or exam. This board game is well suited for advanced high school courses and introductory college-level courses that have only limited time to cover the immune system and microbiology. Documents containing the necessary components of the board game (not including a six-sided die) are included in the supplemental materials, so educators can print out their own copies and use this board game in their classes with no cost to themselves or their students.

What Happened Following Comprehensive Developmental Education Reform in the Sunshine State? The Impact of Florida’s Developmental Education Reform on Introductory College-Level Course Completion

Florida’s Senate Bill 1720 allowed many students to bypass developmental education and enroll directly in introductory college-level courses. We use an interrupted time series design to introductory college-level courses enrollment and passing rates in English and math for three cohorts of college students prereform and three cohorts postreform. Based on a cohort-by-cohort comparative analysis, we find that cohorts after the reform are more likely to enroll and pass introductory college-level courses in their 1st year of college, indicating that the reform may help to accelerate student success in college. Further, we find that Black and Hispanic students experience even greater gains in passing rates than White students, effectively narrowing the racial/ethnic achievement gap.

Karen D. Holl. Primer of Ecological Restoration

Significant areas of terrestrial, wetland, and aquatic ecosystems globally have been destroyed or greatly degraded, greatly impacting ecosystem services, most critical to human well-being. Ecological restoration can begin the process of recovering these ecosystems. The Primer of Ecological Restoration (Holl 2020) succinctly covers the ecological principles, project planning and management, sociology, and policies of ecological restoration. External links to the book’s website substantially complements the text, which is intended for an introductory college-level course on the topic and for practitioners.

What Happens to Efficiency and Equity? The Cost Implications of Developmental Education Reform

Florida passed legislation in 2013 that exempted many students from developmental education, and required colleges to implement new instructional modalities for optional developmental education courses. This paper uses an economic model of remediation to examine how changes in college course taking before and after the reform altered costs to completing introductory college-level courses in math and English for students and institutions, and whether cost savings differ by racial/ethnic subgroup. We also take into account changes in short-term costs relative to course completion rates to examine whether the reform is cost effective overall. We find that the total cost per completer (including costs to both students and institutions) decreased after the reform by $894 in English and $1851 in math. This resulted in efficiency gains of 34% in English and 30% in math. The results from Florida provide promising evidence that statewide developmental education reforms may be an effective mechanism for reducing costs to students and institutions. Reform efforts may also help to reduce racial/ethnic gaps in the costs to gateway completion in both subject areas, which has important implications for equity.

Students’ Reasoning about Variability in Graphs during an Introductory Statistics Course

Variation and variability are key concepts in K-16 statistics education. Prior research has investigated students’ reasoning about variability in different contexts. However, there is a lack of research on students’ development of understanding of variability when comparing distributions in bar graphs, dot plots, and histograms as they took an introductory college-level statistics course. This exploratory case study conducted three interviews with each of the ten participants through a four-month period, at the beginning, middle, and end of the course. The Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy was used to analyze participants’ responses. Results indicated that overall the group of participants demonstrated a stable understanding of variability over the semester (i.e. lack of improvement). However, when examining each student’s reasoning, four types of reasoning development paths were found: improvement, lack of change, decline, and inconsistent. This study provides implications in teaching college introductory statistics course and recommendations for future research.

Effects of childhood setting and interaction with nature on academic performance in introductory college-level courses in the environmental sciences

This study explored the relationships between student background and academic performance in college introductory environmental science (ES) courses at a large U.S. research university with the premise that this analysis may inform teaching practices, curricula, and efforts to increase retention. We surveyed over 700 students across eleven introductory ES courses and used multiple linear mixed-effects regressions to model the data. We found that students who grew up in rural settings or who had frequent childhood interactions with natural environments earned higher grades, on average, than students from urban settings or with fewer childhood interactions with natural environments. Our results indicate that students reporting frequent childhood interactions with forests, for example, were projected to earn grades up to 1.5 letter grades higher in these courses than students with no such interactions. In addition, students with frequent childhood interactions with nature were likelier to report that such interactions helped them in their ES course, suggesting that these students may recognize the value of these experiences. Greater interest in the subject matter also correlated with higher ES course grades, whereas amount of prior ES coursework did not. We discuss the possible implications of these correlations for ES academic performance and educational practice.

How High School Coursework Predicts Introductory College-Level Course Success

Objective: In recent years, developmental education (DE) reform has led to a restructuring of the placement process, redesigning of course instructional modalities, or implementing student support services to supplement developmental coursework. In Florida, recent legislative changes allowed students to opt out of placement testing and enroll directly in college-level courses regardless of academic ability. The purpose of this study is to understand how students’ high school transcript information can be used in the academic advising process when students are no longer required to take standardized placement tests. Method: We used a combination of high school courses from statewide student-level data and conducted logistic regression analyses to understand how these courses help predict success in English Composition 1 and Intermediate Algebra. We also developed student profiles and presented predicted probabilities to illustrate how students with different combinations of high school coursework were pred...

Research on the Academic Benefits of the Advanced Placement Program

With more than 3 million participants per year, the Advanced Placement (AP) program is one of the most popular programs in the United States for exposing high-achieving high school students to advanced academic content. Sponsored by the College Board, the AP program provides a framework in which high school teachers can teach introductory college-level courses to high school students. These students then take one of 34 standardized tests at the end of the year, and students who score well on their course’s AP test can receive college credit from their university in which they later enroll. Despite the popularity of the AP program, remarkably little independent research has been conducted on the academic benefits of AP. In this article, I summarize the state of knowledge about the academic benefits of AP. Previous research and descriptive data indicate that AP students outperform non-AP students on a variety of academic measures, but many other aspects of the program are poorly understood, partially due to variability across AP subjects. These aspects include the causal impact of AP, which components of the program are most effective in boosting academic achievement, and how students engage with the AP program. I also conclude by making suggestions for researchers to use new methodologies to investigate new scientific and policy questions and new student populations to improve the educational scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of the AP program.

Effects of reinforcement on test-enhanced learning in a large, diverse introductory college psychology course.

A robust finding within laboratory research is that structuring information as a test confers benefit on long-term retention-referred to as the testing effect. Although well characterized in laboratory environments, the testing effect has been explored infrequently within ecologically valid contexts. We conducted a series of 3 experiments within a very large introductory college-level course. Experiment 1 examined the impact of required versus optional frequent low-stakes testing (quizzes) on student grades, revealing students were much more likely to take advantage of quizzing if it was a required course component. Experiment 2 implemented a method of evaluating pedagogical intervention within a single course (thereby controlling for instructor bias and student self-selection), which revealed a testing effect. Experiment 3 ruled out additional exposure to information as an explanation for the findings of Experiment 2 and suggested that students at the college level, enrolled in very large sections, accept frequent quizzing well. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Impact of Participation in the Advanced Placement Program on Students' College Admissions Test Scores

ABSTRACTThe Advanced Placement (AP) program is an educational program that permits high school students to take introductory college-level courses and receive college credit by passing a standardized end-of-course exam. Data were obtained from a statewide database of 2 high school graduating cohorts (N = 90,044). We used a series of propensity score analyses and marginal mean weighting through stratification to examine the impact of the AP program on students' academic achievement as measured by ACT scores. Results indicate that merely enrolling in an AP course produces very little benefit for students. Students who take and pass the AP exam, however, obtain higher ACT scores, even after controlling for a wide variety of academic, socioeconomic, and demographic variables. The authors conclude the article by discussing aspects of the AP program that remain unanswered.

Removing the entropy from the definition of entropy: clarifying the relationship between evolution, entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics

Misinterpretations of entropy and conflation with additional misunderstandings of the second law of thermodynamics are ubiquitous among scientists and non-scientists alike and have been used by creationists as the basis of unfounded arguments against evolutionary theory. Entropy is not disorder or chaos or complexity or progress towards those states. Entropy is a metric, a measure of the number of different ways that a set of objects can be arranged. Herein, we review the history of the concept of entropy from its conception by Clausius in 1867 to its more recent application to macroevolutionary theory. We provide teachable examples of (correctly defined) entropy that are appropriate for high school or introductory college level courses in biology and evolution. Finally, we discuss the association of these traditionally physics-related concepts to evolution. Clarification of the interactions between entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, and evolution has the potential for immediate benefit to both students and teachers.

Exploring Uncertainty with Projectile Launchers

The proper choice of a measurement technique that minimizes systematic and random uncertainty is an essential part of experimental physics. These issues are difficult to teach in the introductory laboratory, though. Because most experiments involve only a single measurement technique, students are often unable to make a clear distinction between random and systematic uncertainties, or to compare the uncertainties associated with different techniques. In this paper, we describe an experiment suitable for an introductory college-level (or advanced high school) course that uses velocity measurements to clearly show students the effects of both random and systematic uncertainties.

Leading by Example: A Case Study of Peer Leader Programs at Two Achieving the Dream Colleges

This report draws on the experiences of two Massachusetts community colleges that employed academically successful students to serve as peer leaders. The Achieving the Dream initiative supports colleges’ investments in the resources and personnel needed to make desired institution-wide changes. As part of the initiative, Northern Essex Community College has used Supplemental Instruction Leaders, and Bunker Hill Community College has used Peer Mentors in order to strengthen student success and promote institutional improvement efforts.Both colleges chose to implement peer leader programs in developmental (remedial) and gatekeeper (introductory college-level) courses that have historically been difficult for many students to pass. This report describes recruitment, training, activities, and costs related to developing these peer leader programs as well as how peer leaders worked with students and faculty inside the classroom. Students, peer leaders, faculty, and administrators offered perspectives in focus groups and interviews during the 2010-2011 academic year. Key findings include the following:--Peer leaders at both colleges offered additional academic assistance to students by introducing and reinforcing lessons covered in class and by helping their faculty partners facilitate classroom activities.--Program staff and faculty members recruited and selected peer leaders with strong academic and interpersonal skills. However, specific peer leader tasks and functions inside and outside the classroom varied based on how assigned faculty members agreed to have peer leaders work with students.--Students in peer-assisted courses generally felt that they benefited from receiving peer leaders’ guidance and support, and they appreciated that this guidance and support was provided by fellow students.--Both colleges have expanded their peer leader programs across sections and disciplines, prompting them to establish more program standards and articulate more practices. College administrators generally considered the programs affordable and cost-effective.The development of peer leader programs at Northern Essex and Bunker Hill reveals innovative ways in which colleges can enhance student learning and engagement in community college classrooms. Over the past years, both colleges have carefully implemented and expanded peer leader programs for students in need of extra support. Peer leaders provide a unique perspective for students and have the ability to create a learning environment unlike that of the typical instructor-student relationship. Community colleges interested in creating or expanding their own peer leader programs may find lessons in the theoretical, operational, and fiscal challenges and considerations that marked the implementation of the two programs discussed in this report.

Remedial Testing and Placement in Community Colleges

Almost half of students who enter college require some sort of remedial coursework. Further, states are increasingly moving the responsibility of postsecondary remediation away from four-year campuses to two-year institutions. Scholars and policymakers have grappled with best practice for successfully filling in academic gaps and moving students forward, and there is variation both within and between states as to the ways in which remediation is defined, determined, and administered (Perin, 2006). Using a regression discontinuity design, this study seeks to answer the following question on one community college campus: How does placement into remedial services affect student outcomes, in particular, successful completion of an introductory college-level English course? Although this study focuses on a single community college system, the findings have bearing on a wider sector as the developmental placement practices of Harper Community College District are not unlike those implemented by two- and four-year campuses across the country.

“Physics with a Smile”—Explaining Phenomena with a Qualitative Problem-Solving Strategy

Various studies indicate that high school physics students and even college students majoring in physics have difficulties in qualitative understanding of basic concepts and principles of physics.1–5 For example, studies carried out with the Force Concept Inventory (FCI)1,6 illustrate that qualitative tasks are not easy to solve even at the college level. Consequently, “conceptual physics” courses have been designed to foster qualitative understanding, and advanced high school physics courses as well as introductory college-level courses strive to develop qualitative understanding. Many physics education researchers emphasize the importance of acquiring some qualitative understanding of basic concepts in physics as early as middle school or in the context of courses that offer “Physics First” in the ninth grade before biology or chemistry.7 This trend is consistent with the call to focus the science curriculum on a small number of basic concepts and ideas, and to instruct students in a more “meaningful way” leading to better understanding. Studies7–10 suggest that familiar everyday contexts (see Fig. 1) are useful in fostering qualitative understanding.

The Maury Project, DataStreme Ocean, and Online Ocean Studies: AMS Initiatives in Ocean Science Education

The education program of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) has developed and nationally implemented two unique pre-college teacher enhancement programs on the ocean sciences, the Maury Project and DataStreme Ocean. In addition, the AMS has employed the successful DataStreme model to make available to colleges and universities an undergraduate distance-learning course on the fundamentals of oceanography, Online Ocean Studies. The Maury Project, established in 1994, is a partnership with the U.S. Naval Academy and State University of New York (SUNY) at Brockport, with significant support from the U.S. Navy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Maury Project trains and equips pre-college teachers to be peer trainers on the physical foundations of selected oceanographic topics. They are initially trained in a two-week workshop hosted by the U.S. Naval Academy. Subsequently, participating teachers present training sessions for other teachers with materials prepared by the Project. To date, approximately 300 educators have attended the workshop and tens of thousands of teachers have been peer trained. In 2003, with the goal of reaching a larger audience of pre-college teachers, the AMS in partnership with NOAA and SUNY Brockport initiated DataStreme Ocean. DataStreme Ocean is a semester-long distance-learning course on the basic understandings of oceanography and partially delivered via the Internet. Maury Project alumni work with local university and government laboratory scientists to mentor DataStreme Ocean participants. By fall 2005, over 600 teachers had been enrolled in DataStreme Ocean. Online Ocean Studies is a distance-learning introductory college-level course on the basic understandings of oceanography developed by the AMS in cooperation with NOAA. This semester-length course explores the ocean in the Earth system via investigations keyed to near real-time environmental data derived from ocean and coastal observing systems. Online Ocean Studies is a turnkey package (Web site, customized textbook, investigations manual, and secure faculty Web page) licensed from AMS and adaptable to both traditional lecture/laboratory and totally online local instruction. The AMS piloted Online Ocean Studies during spring 2005 with eleven participating colleges and universities. National implementation took place in fall 2005. Recently, the AMS embarked on a National Science Foundation-funded initiative to facilitate adoption of Online Ocean Studies by minority-serving institutions. The goal is to spur minority student interest in the geosciences.

The Dana Guide to Brain Health

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book Forum: Treatment GuidesFull AccessThe Dana Guide to Brain HealthJOEL YAGER, M.D., JOEL YAGERSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Albuquerque, N.Mex.Published Online:1 May 2004https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.161.5.940AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Although lay readers are able to choose from among many excellent books concerning mental illness and mental health, few really good books have been available that adequately cover new information concerning the neurosciences, the brain, and brain diseases. Even the classic The Broken Brain(1) deals primarily with mental illness. Now, the Dana Foundation has assembled a group of world-class editors and contributors, talented writers, and superb illustrators to offer a top-notch “primer” for the lay public interested in brainy matters.Encyclopedic in scope, and starting with “How to Think About the Brain,” the 19 chapters offer synopses of normal and abnormal brain processes, including such provocative titles as “Basic Brain Care: Protecting Your Mental Capital,” followed by first-rate introductions to development; healthy brain processes; emotions and social functions; and learning, thinking, and remembering. Next we find sections dealing with developmental disorders, brain disorders affecting senses and body functions (including sleep disorders, seizures, and fatigue), infectious and autoimmune disorders, movement and muscle disorders, pain, nervous system injuries, and cognitive disorders. About 70 pages are allotted to psychiatric disorders (a section titled Emotional and Control Disorders). Each topic merits about 2–6 pages of text, and basic concepts are at least briefly reviewed. The book concludes with a helpful glossary, lists of medications used in the treatment of brain diseases, suggested readings, and resource lists of organizations confronting the different disorders.Photographs, line drawings, and easy-to-access tables and figures abound, and the color illustrations are on a par with Frank Netta’s classics. Educators may want to prepare slides from many of the outstanding line drawings and cartoons. The writing is user friendly and should be easily grasped by anyone from advanced high school levels onward. Frequent sidebars summarize important points, including practical advice (e.g., “epilepsy safety measures,” “coping with blindness,” “how to manage your sleep disorder”). All laypeople with curiosity and/or a “need to know” about brains in general or particular brain disorders will be well served by these fine introductory presentations, and the volume would be an especially thoughtful gift for inquisitive, biological-science-minded students—perhaps a way to snare young minds (and their brains) into careers in psychiatry, neurology, and neuroscience. It could easily serve as a text for a lower-level introductory college-level course—instead of Abnormal Psychology, what about Abnormal Brains? However, because the book’s goal is to provide an introductory survey, readers wanting in-depth information on a specific topic will want to go to the suggested supplementary readings.My concern is that too many people needing information about their own brains and those of others these days will head straight to the “net” and fail to take advantage of this high-quality resource, into which so many authorities have obviously put so much time and devoted effort. Should this volume be made available online?Edited by Floyd E. Bloom, M.D., M. Flint Beal, M.D., and David J. Kupfer, M.D. New York, Free Press, 2003, 733 pp., $45.00.Reference1. Andreasen NC: The Broken Brain. New York, HarperCollins, 1984Google Scholar FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 161Issue 5 May 2004Pages 940-940 Metrics History Published online 1 May 2004 Published in print 1 May 2004

415 A Distance Learning Website for Teaching Vegetable Crops at Virginia Tech

A distance learning homepage at: http://www.bsi.vt.edu/welbaum/hort4764/ was created to teach an introductory college-level course on vegetable crops to students at Virginia Tech. The course was created to serve students in the horticulture program at Virginia Beach, Va., students in the Commonwealth who cannot take classes on the Blacksburg campus, and students on the Blacksburg campus who could not schedule the classroom-based course. The course is not selfpaced, but directs students through 44 lessons on various topics including detailed descriptions of 28 different vegetables. The site is primarily in HTML format with archived student projects and old exams in PDF format. Audio clips are used to emphasis key information and to add a personal touch. There are >550 pictures and descriptions of vegetables and vegetable crop production linked to the website. Students can be examined using a computer testing system call Whizquiz that grades and corrects each exam. “Web Forum” software enables online discussion among students and the instructor. Discussion sessions have been successfully conducted between students and guests at distant locations. Links are provided to over 25 other websites with information on vegetable crops. The project was funded by a USDA/CSREES Higher Education Challenge Grant.

Population in Advanced Placement Human Geography

The Advanced Placement human geography course affords high school students the opportunity to experience an introductory college-level course in geography. Population is one of six major themes in the course. The course outline identifies four key areas of study in the population unit: geographical analysis of population, population distribution and composition, population growth and decline over time and space, and population movement. This article addresses each of these areas of study and identifies examples of concepts, topics, and types of data that could form the basis for instructional activities. A resource list is provided for additional reading.