It’s June and that means it’s Pride Month. During Pride Month the LGBTQ+ community celebrates achievements of LGBTQ+ people and raises awareness of challenges LGBTQ+ people face. It takes place in June because that is when the Stonewall riots took place in 1969 in Manhattan, New York City, US…
According to the National Research Council, one of the drivers of inequity in STEM education is the lack of access to STEM learning experiences that provide the foundational background knowledge and skills necessary for students to engage successfully in college-level STEM coursework and to foster a sense of belonging in STEM (3). In other words, one of the reasons why some groups of students may seem more interested and motivated to pursue STEM coursework at the university level is simply because they have had more opportunities to engage meaningfully with STEM research and projects.
One way to engage students and foster their learning is through in-class quizzes. In-class quizzes have gained in popularity due to the open access to polling software that teachers can easily set up and students can engage with via their phones, tablets, or laptops (e.g., Kahoot, Slido, Poll Everywhere). Therefore, quick in-class quizzes are easy to administer…
The world will never be the same since we own digital devices. Indeed, the Internet can alter cognitive processes (1), for example, by promoting continuous division of attention - which in turn reduces our ability to maintain concentration on a particular task.
For a lot of students, final exams create a sense of dread and a lot of anxiety. As if they weren’t worried enough, that worry can actually cause worse performance on exams (1). One of the mechanisms for the lower performance may have to do with working memory.
In spite of many cognitive psychologists’ efforts to dispel the myth, the learning styles theory is still popular in many educational circles. Learning styles is the idea that individual students have learning preferences, and importantly, in order to maximize learning, students need instruction in their preferred style. …
