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Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) have been shown to facilitate students’ pursuit of graduate studies and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, includi...

Embedded within ongoing university-community partnerships, participatory action research experiences for undergraduates – or PAR-based UREs – are multi-disciplinary, action-oriented research opport...

To meet the sustainability challenges of the future, we need leaders who are trained to work well in diverse, multidisciplinary teams and a populace that understands the biophysical and socioeconomic challenges facing humanity and how to meet the needs of its diverse stakeholders. With a goal of increasing climate literacy amongst college students, we developed a cooperative jigsaw activity to encourage students to explore the complexities of joint decision making when taking into account multiple perspectives. We found that undergraduate science (natural science and natural resources) students were engaged, drew on a variety of types of evidence to support claims about managing rangelands impacted by climate change, and referenced both complex social and natural systems in their postassessment. 2014 National Association of Geoscience Teachers. [DOI: 10.5408/13-070.1]

This paper introduces a variation on the post-test only cohort control design and addresses questions concerning both the methodological credibility and the practical utility of employing this design variation in evaluations of large-scale complex professional development programmes in mathematics education. The original design and design variation, which adds a pre-test measure and gain scores for both pre-treatment and post-treatment conditions, are compared theoretically for their respective controls on threats to internal validity, and practically for their comparative ease of implementation in field settings. We conclude that the design variation adds important controls to selection bias that the original design cannot. From a utility perspective, however, there are trade-offs, because this design variation requires more data collection observations, more complex data management and certain psychometric characteristics for the outcome measure.