PurposeCollege students who are interested in experiencing and learning about other cultures could be potential agents to ongoing social and policy initiatives in promoting societal changes. As universities intensify their efforts toward embracing cultural diversity, it is imperative to gauge how these diversity initiatives resonate with students' developmental stage and pursuits in diverse campus climates. However, what kinds of educational experiences/contexts students choose for enhancing cultural competence, and how seeking diversity experiences might benefit college students in emotional wellbeing and cognitive skills, are under-investigated.Design/methodology/approachThis study explores the relationships among college students' diversity-seeking behaviors, cultural competence, perspective-taking, and flourishing. A total of 359 college students from a STEM-focused university participated in this study. Students were recruited from classes over four semesters, from 2021 to 2023.FindingsStudents exhibited moderate to high levels of interest in seeking diversity in their learning experiences. Results from the structural equation modeling showed that higher levels of diversity-seeking in learning were associated with higher levels of perceived cultural competence, as well as higher levels of perspective-taking and flourishing.Originality/valueThis research delves into experiential and extracurricular dimensions of learning diversity, bridging a significant gap in academic literature. This study also elucidates the links between aspects of diversity engagement, cultural competence, and positive outcomes for college students, which underscores the significance of diversity-focused educational opportunities in higher education. Such opportunities are instrumental in enhancing cultural proficiency and further implications on cognitive growth and emotional well-being.

IntroductionEvidence-based teaching (EBT) practices benefit students, yet our understanding of how frequently these strategies should be utilized in STEM courses is less established.MethodsIn this study, students (n = 894) of faculty who learned about how to implement EBTs from the Summer Institutes for Scientific Teaching were surveyed. The students rated the frequency of implementation of six types of EBTs after the course and completed a follow-up survey one year later to examine long-term outcomes.ResultsClass and student-level analyses indicated that students who reported being exposed to EBTs every couple of classes also reported that they learned more and had a higher ability to work in groups when compared to students who were exposed to EBTs less frequently.DiscussionThe results will help instructors and faculty development professionals understand how frequently EBTs should be incorporated when designing and modifying courses.

Course-based research experiences (CUREs) are shown to be more engaging for college students, lead to better academic performance, and increase students' intent to persist in science. This especially holds true when compared to lecture-based science courses with standard lab assignments. Less attention has been given, however, to the nuanced week-by-week experiences of students participating in CURE courses over a semester. This study addresses why it is crucial to understand how student interest is sustained throughout the CURE course, despite potential challenges and frustrations. Conducted over a 15-week period, this longitudinal study examines enrolled students (N = 170) who had one of 13 instructors from six institutions. The results indicate that students' high frustration with participation in CUREs moderates the relationship between perceived challenge and interest. In addition, higher levels of the variable 'meaning making' among students have significant associations with week-by-week interest maintenance throughout the semester. Findings suggest that to sustain high levels of student interest over a semester, CURE instructors should focus more on reducing student frustration within CURE course operations. To further support student interest, these findings also suggest that instructors need to foster and emphasize the connections of CURE course content to students' own lives and personal goals to sustain their interest.

The effect of social preferences, such as altruism and trust, on economic development is widely recognized. However, the reciprocal impact, i.e., how individuals experience the economic environment and how this shapes their social preferences, has remained largely under-explored. This study sheds light on this reciprocal effect, revealing an intriguing macroeconomic impact on individuals' social preferences. By harnessing the Global Preference Survey data and a non-linear regression model, our findings highlight an interesting trend: there is a discernible decrease in individuals' social preference as they experience enhanced economic conditions, and this effect is more pronounced for males. This crucial revelation underscores the importance for researchers and policymakers to take into account the prospective attenuation of social preferences in the pursuit of economic well-being.

Background Applied Calculus courses serve hundreds of thousands of undergraduates as quantitative preparation and gatekeepers across diverse fields of study. The current study investigated how motivational factors are associated with students’ learning outcomes in Applied Calculus courses from the perspective of self-determination theory—a sound comprehensive motivation theory that has been supported by considerable research in psychology and education. In order to have a nuanced understanding of students’ motivation and learning in Applied Calculus courses, we used three different types of learning measures to investigate students’ mathematics achievement, including course grades, a standardized knowledge exam, and students’ perceived knowledge transferability. Results We tested the relationships between motivational factors and learning outcomes with a multi-semester sample of 3226 undergraduates from 188 Applied Calculus classrooms. To increase the precision of our analysis, we controlled for three demographic variables that are suggested to be relevant to mathematics achievement: gender, minority group status, and socioeconomic status. With a series of multilevel modeling analyses, the results reveal that: (1) competence satisfaction predicts college students’ mathematics achievement over and above the satisfaction of needs for autonomy and relatedness; and (2) autonomous motivation is a more powerful predictor of college students’ mathematics achievement than controlled motivation and amotivation. These findings are consistent across different types of learning outcomes. Conclusions Self-determination theory provides an effective framework for understanding college students’ motivation and learning in Applied Calculus courses. This study extends self-determination theory in the field of mathematics education and contributes to the dialogue on advancing undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education by providing evidence to understand how motivational factors are associated with students’ learning outcomes in undergraduate mathematics courses.

Evidence-based teaching practices (EBPs) foster college science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students' engagement and performance, yet our knowledge of what contributes to the effectiveness of these practices is less established. We propose a framework that links four social-cognitive variables-students' trust in their instructors, growth mindset, buy-in to instructional practices, and course engagement-to long-standing desired student outcomes of academic performance and intent to persist in science. This framework was tested in classrooms identified as having a high level of EBP implementation with a multi-institutional sample of 2102 undergraduates taught by 14 faculty members. Results indicate that the buy-in framework is a valid representation of college students' learning experiences within EBP contexts overall as well as across underrepresented student groups. In comparison to students' level of growth mindset, students' trust in their instructors was more than twice as predictive of buy-in to how the course was being taught, suggesting that students' views of their instructors are more associated with thriving in a high-EBP course environment than their views of intelligence. This study contributes to the dialogue on transforming undergraduate STEM education by providing a validated student buy-in framework as a lens to understand how EBPs enhance student outcomes.

Abstract A growing body of evidence had demonstrated that increased student exposure and commitment to evidence-based teaching (EBT) leads to improved academic performance, greater persistence, and higher buy-in to instructional methods. Despite the increasing number of teaching development opportunities available to STEM instructors, which often encourage the use of EBT, implementation is still highly variable across instructors. The frequency with which students are exposed to EBT across multiple courses in a department or university has not been studied in relation to students’ success in a given course or their ultimate persistence in STEM. This study shows that there is a cumulative benefit of exposure to EBT across multiple courses. Students who are frequently exposed to EBT also find these practices to be more valuable and report a higher intention to persist in STEM. If students demonstrate higher commitment after multiple EBT exposures, this may increase the likelihood that faculty will incorporate these teaching practices into their courses. The findings are useful for instructors, faculty, department chairs, and administrators who are attempting to support a more unified, evidence-based approach to teaching in their department or institution.

The aims of this paper are to examine the breadth of scholarship that emerged from a large-scale university-wide course transformation program between 2011 and 2021, to investigate how the course transformation program influenced students' perceptions of their learning environment and learning achievement, and to discuss future directions for improving autonomy-supportive learning in higher education. We gathered all quantitative and qualitative publications related to the IMPACT course transformation program, and 35 articles were included in the study. Since the scope of the study topics in the course transformation program varied and program implementation was applied to various study contexts and disciplines, the findings were first summarized in a narrative manner. Additionally, a meta-analysis was conducted to examine the effectiveness of the course transformation based on 10 journal articles that adopted quasi-experimental designs. The findings revealed that the courses redesigned through the program supported students' positive learning experiences, including motivation, satisfaction regarding basic psychological needs, knowledge transferability, and academic performance. This paper discusses implications and future directions to enhance undergraduate students' academic success through course redesign. Further exploration is needed to determine the additional effect of course redesign in higher education.

Assessing scientific argumentation is one of main challenges in science education. Constructed-response (CR) items can be used to measure the coherence of student ideas and inform science instruction on argumentation. Published research on automated scoring of CR items has been conducted mostly in English writing, rarely in other languages. The objective of this study is to investigate issues related to the automated scoring of Chinese written responses. LightSIDE was used to score students’ written responses in Chinese. The sample of this study was from Beijing (grades 7–9) consisting of 4000 students. Items for assessing interpreting data and making claims under an ecological topic developed by the Stanford NGSS Assessment Project were translated into Chinese and used to assess student competence of interpreting data and making claims. The results show that: (1) at least 800 human-scored student responses were needed as the training sample size to accurately build scoring models. When doubling the training sample size, the accuracy in kappa increased only slightly by 0.03–0.04; (2) there was a nearly perfect agreement between human scoring and computer-automated scoring based on both holistic scores and analytic scores, although analytic scores produced slightly better accuracy than holistic scores; (3) automated scoring accuracy did not differ substantially by student response length, although shorter text length produced slightly higher human-machine agreement. The above findings suggest that automated scoring of Chinese writings produced a similar level of accuracy compared with that of English writings reported in literature, although there are specific considerations, e.g., training data set size, scoring rubric, and text lengths, to be considered using automated scoring of student written responses in Chinese.

In response to the outbreak of COVID-19 the national landscape of higher education changed quickly and dramatically to move “online” in the Spring semester of 2020. While distressing to both faculty and students, it presents a unique opportunity to explore how students responded to this unexpected and challenging learning situation. In four undergraduate STEM courses that incorporated course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs)—which are often focused on discovery learning and laboratory research—we had an existing study in progress to track students' interest development at five time points over the Spring 2020 semester. Via this ongoing study we were able to investigate how students stay engaged in their college science courses when facing unexpected challenges and obstacles to their learning. Longitudinal survey data from 41 students in these CURE courses demonstrated that students' situational interest dropped significantly when their CURE courses unexpectedly shifted from hands-on, discovery-based, and laboratory-based instruction to online instruction. Although we observed a dramatic decline in student interest in general after the CURE courses moved fully online, the decline rates varied across students. Students who were able to make meaningful connections between the learning activities and their personal or career goals were more likely to maintain a higher level of interest in the course. Implications for practice are discussed.

Grounded in self-determination theory, the integrative model for learning and motivation examines how student motivational processes link to course outcomes, including perceived knowledge transferability. This investigation sought to evaluate the tenets of the integrative model that link the classroom climate, basic psychological needs satisfaction, and self-regulated motivation to perceived knowledge transferability. Participants included 4385 students (2185 females, 2200 males) enrolled in courses across a variety of disciplines at a large university in the U.S. Midwest. The students completed a cross-sectional survey, and the data analysis process proceeded using factor analytic and structural equation modeling procedures. Results indicate that the data were a good fit for the model, C3(342) = 6691.75, p < .001, RMSEA = .08, SRMR = .05, TLI = .94, CFI = .95. Developing student-centered learning environments is integral to enhancing motivation and perceptions of knowledge transferability through the satisfaction of students' need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Service participation plays a critical role in adolescent development. To explore the characteristics of Chinese adolescents' service participation, a national survey (N = 6161 adolescents) was conducted in mainland China. Findings indicated that: (i) Chinese adolescents mostly participated in routine service activities within school, and the quality of their service experiences was relative low; (ii) adolescents' service experiences varied across different districts, school types, and family structures; and (iii) the intensity, breadth, and type of service participation and service quality significantly predicted adolescents' civic attitudes and intention for future service. Moreover, service quality moderated the association between service types or breadth and adolescent outcomes. Future longitudinal research is needed to further examine the association between adolescents' service participation and developmental outcomes.

As a form of experiential education, service learning (SL) shows great potential for promoting students' knowledge transfer as it offers students opportunities to apply what they have learned in classrooms to serve communities in real-life contexts. To explore how students' knowledge transfer evolves during SL, we collected longitudinal survey data from 96 Chinese college students in a 9-week SL program. Results indicate that (a) students' perceived knowledge transfer in SL did not follow a linear trajectory. Although students' perceived knowledge transfer at the end of SL was significantly higher than those at the beginning, a slight drop was observed in the middle of SL; (b) the developmental pattern of perceived knowledge transfer varied across students; and (c) students' perceived knowledge transfer development during SL was associated with mastery goal orientation and perceptions of psychologically controlling behaviors from their SL supervisors. By providing evidence of the dynamic process and mechanisms of students' knowledge transfer development, the present study adds to our understanding of how, when, and why the benefits of SL are realized.

Service-learning (SL) is a form of experiential education which promotes student learning through community service and critical reflection. This study aims to examine the effect of SL on Chinese college students' transfer of learning and to explore the psychological mechanism of such effect. In Phase 1 with 186 Chinese college students, the SL group performed better in the quality of transfer but worse in the quantity of transfer than the traditional group. In Phase 2, survey data from the SL group demonstrated that constructive cognitive conflict had positive effects on behavioral engagement and transfer of learning; behavioral engagement fully mediated the relation between cognitive conflict and transfer of learning; and gender moderated the relation between cognitive conflict and behavioral engagement. This study answered whether and why SL could promote Chinese college students' transfer of learning. It has significant implications for promoting SL in reforming current teaching practice in China.

The distinction between the bright and the dark sides of basic psychological needs has been documented in face-to-face contexts. However, no one has examined the distinctive effects of need satisfaction and need dissatisfaction in online learning contexts. First, we validated the Basic Psychological Needs Scale among 693 undergraduates in online courses. However, we found one autonomy item and two relatedness items might need modifications to fit the online learning contexts. Second, we tested a motivation and learning model with both online (495 undergraduates) and face-to-face (519 undergraduates) samples. Consistent with previous findings in face-to-face contexts, need satisfaction and need dissatisfaction demonstrated distinctive effects on students' motivation and learning outcomes in online learning contexts. The current research contributes to the developing field of online learning by applying BPN into the online courses and comparing the motivation model between online and face-to-face learning contexts.

When applying self-determination theory to educational settings, evidence suggests that the basic psychological need of relatedness is actually multi-dimensional, which could result in differential influences on intrinsic motivation. Thus, this study proposes a modification to the operationalization of relatedness. The relatedness items from the adapted Basic Satisfaction Needs at Work scale were altered so that items asked students to separately report the amount of connection they feel with their instructors and peers, as opposed to the original items that asked them to more broadly reflect on people in their course. College students (556 female, 321 male) completed a questionnaire assessing their basic psychological needs, including the two new relatedness subscales, motivation, and academic outcomes. Results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the original relatedness scale should, in fact, be treated as two-dimensional. In addition, of all the basic psychological needs, instructor relatedness was most predictive of student interest/enjoyment in the course and self-reported effort. Conversely, peer relatedness did not significantly predict any outcome variables. Study implications, limitations, and areas for future research are discussed.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate international students' willingness to communicate (WTC) in US university classrooms, focusing on the role of classroom environment. International students in higher education have great economic and academic impacts, studying their WTC in classrooms facilitates their learning and speaking of English and helps them better participate in class activities and acclimatize to schooling in their adopted cultures. Design/methodology/approach Survey data were collected from 50 Chinese undergraduate students who took English as a second language (ESL) class at a large Midwestern university. Four students participated in follow-up interviews. Findings Results revealed that in ESL classrooms, confidence and motivation had a direct impact on WTC, classroom environment had an indirect effect on WTC through the mediation of motivation and confidence. Qualitative analysis also showed that classroom environment greatly impacted WTC in both ESL and general classrooms, and teacher factors were most important. Practical implications These results have direct pedagogical implications for teachers serving international students in higher education. Originality/value This study facilitates the understanding of the previously under-studied influence of classroom environments on WTC, which has direct pedagogical implications. WTC research focuses predominantly on language learning classrooms, this study initiates an extended exploration of WTC in language learning as well as general classrooms.

In traditional English listening class, the most popular teaching pattern is solely based on ―listening audio---answering questions---checking answers.‖ However, students always feel confused about the content of listening materials and even don‘t know how to seize the key information during listening process. Moreover, due to exam-oriented education system, most students just receive listening training in a very passive way without efficient outcome, which leads to a much worse situation in English listening learning. Therefore, we need to make certain change on English listening Teaching Strategy, and one of good ways is to use the strategy of retelling in English listening class. Using retelling in English listening class is beneficial for students to seize English speaking and listening skills, as well as improve language ability. The author implements teaching activity according to students‘ actual level, combining retelling strategy with listening teaching. Through the comparison of test data, it is found that the retelling strategy is helpful to improve not only the efficiency of English teaching, but also students‘ oral and listening skills.

Participation in a service-learning (SL) study abroad (SA) program has been shown to enhance cultural competence (Krishnan, Richards & Simpson, 2016) as measured via the Public Affairs Scale (PAS; Levesque-Bristol & Cornelius-White, 2012). The purpose of this study was 1) to evaluate students' development of intercultural competence using the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI®), a tool specifically designed for this purpose, and 2) to evaluate whether intentionally escalating culturally focused developmental experiential learning together with existing course content would increase cultural competence more than program participation alone. Thirty female and one male student participated over three years of the SL SA program. Quantitative data collected included a pre- and post-program administration of the IDI®. Qualitative data included student reflection papers regarding the intentional cultural intervention activities they completed. Comparison of the pre- and post-IDI® showed mixed results with program participation alone, but showed a significant increase in intercultural competence when intentional cultural interventions were included in course content. Results indicate that a short-term SA program with a SL component can be a mechanism for students to enhance intercultural competence when intentional and targeted cultural interventions are included in course activities.