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Providing guidance to learners navigating a game-based learning environment requires walking a fine line between encouraging progression toward learning goals without disrupting playful engagement in the game. In this paper, we present a scaffolding guidebook developed for tutors to provide guidance in game-based learning environments that encourages exploration of the problem space and solving puzzles without disrupting engagement. Scaffolding strategies were coded and categorized from Baba is You gameplay recordings of 13 middle school and 12 undergraduate students and then situated based on guiding principles from relevant literature into a scaffolding guide. Here, we describe this guidebook and its development, which could provide educators with important tools that can help their students progress through game-based learning environments without interfering with engagement.

Background: We used an opportunity gap framework to analyze the pathways through which students enter into and depart from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees in an R1 higher education institution and to better understand the demographic disparities in STEM degree attainment. Results: We found disparities in 6-year STEM graduation rates on the basis of gender, race/ethnicity, and parental education level. Using mediation analysis, we showed that the gender disparity in STEM degree attainment was explained by disparities in aspiration: a gender disparity in students' intent to pursue STEM at the beginning of college; women were less likely to graduate with STEM degrees because they were less likely to intend to pursue STEM degrees. However, disparities in STEM degree attainment across race/ethnicities and parental education level were largely explained by disparities in attrition: persons excluded because of their ethnicity or race (PEERs) and first generation students were less likely to graduate with STEM degrees due to fewer academic opportunities provided prior to college (estimated using college entrance exams scores) and more academic challenges during college as captured by first year GPAs. Conclusions: Our results reinforce the idea that patterns of departure from STEM pathways differ among marginalized groups. To promote and retain students in STEM, it is critical that we understand these differing patterns and consider structural efforts to support students at different stages in their education.

Studies suggest that active learning positively impacts the student learning experience. However, the supporting data are mostly aggregated across different demographic groups, and hence little is known about equity in active learning implementation and how it may vary across diverse populations and different instructional components. This perspectives article offers ideas for how introductory chemistry instructors can foster both equitable and active learning implementation for all students. Semistructured interviews with students from diverse backgrounds have revealed barriers to equity in the different components of an active learning chemistry course: "outside-classroom preparation," "inside-classroom activities," and "feedback and assessment." Recommendations for addressing these barriers are also provided based on the student interviews and from the literature. The findings are likely applicable to all science disciplines.

The ability to solve authentic real-world problems in science, engineering, and medicine is an important goal in post-secondary education. Despite extensive research on problem solving and expertise, the teaching and assessing of advanced problem-solving skills in post-secondary students remains a challenge. We present a template for creating assessments of advanced problem-solving skills that is applicable across science, engineering, and medical disciplines. It is based on a cognitive model of the problem-solving process that is empirically grounded in the study of skilled practitioners ('experts') solving authentic problems in their disciplines. These assessments have three key features that overcome shortcomings of current assessment approaches: (1) a more authentic amount and sequence of information provided, (2) opportunities for students to make decisions, and (3) scoring based on comparison with skilled practitioners. This provides a more complete and accurate assessment of authentic problem-solving skills than currently exists for science, engineering, and medicine. Such assessments will be valuable to instructors and curriculum designers for evaluating and improving the teaching of problem solving in these disciplines. We provide examples of problem-solving assessments that illustrate the use of this template in several disciplines.

Introductory calculus-based mechanics ("Physics 1") is an important gateway course for students desiring to pursue a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career. A major challenge with this course is the large spread in the students' incoming physics preparation. This level of preparation is strongly predictive of a students' performance because of the overlap between Physics 1 and high school physics courses. Because the level of students' incoming preparation is largely determined by the quality of their high school physics courses, Physics 1 can amplify K-12 educational inequities and be a barrier for marginalized students wishing to pursue a STEM career. Here, we present a novel introductory course design to address this equity challenge. The design and implementation are based on the concept of deliberate practice as applied to learning real-world problem solving. Students explicitly practice research-identified decision-based skills required for problem solving in the context of solving real-world problems. The problems used in the course and their solutions have little resemblance to what students encounter in high school physics, thereby reducing the dependence of course performance on the high school physics preparation. Versions of this course were taught at a highly selective private and a lightly selective public university. The students who took the course learned the physics content knowledge they needed for future courses, particularly in engineering, and their problem-solving skills improved substantially. Furthermore, their course performance had much less correlation with their incoming physics preparation than was the case for the outcomes from the traditional Physics 1 courses at both institutions: in one case the correlation dropped from r = 0.62 to 0.14, and on the other case the correlation dropped from r = 0.56 to 0.26. These findings suggest this course design can be a more equitable version of the traditional Physics 1 course, and hence particularly beneficial for marginalized students.

We have studied the impact of incoming preparation and demographic variables on student performance on the final exam in the standard introductory calculus-based mechanics course at three different institutions. Multivariable regression analysis was used to examine the extent to which exam scores can be predicted by a variety of variables that are available to most faculty and departments. The results are surprisingly consistent across the institutions, with only math SAT or ACT scores and concept inventory prescores having predictive power. They explain 20%-30% of the variation in student exam performance in all three cases. In all cases, although there appear to be gaps in exam performance if one considers only demographic variables (gender, underrepresented minority, first generation), once these two proxies of incoming preparation are controlled for, there is no longer a demographic gap. There is only a preparation gap that applies equally across the entire student population. This work shows that to properly understand differences in student performance, it is important to do statistical analyses that take multiple variables into account, covering both subject-specific and general preparation. Course designs and teaching better matched to the incoming student preparation will likely eliminate performance gaps across demographic groups, while also improving the success of all students.

Manipulative environments play a fundamental role in inquiry-based science learning, yet how they impact learning is not fully understood. In a series of two studies, we develop the argument that manipulative environments (MEs) influence the kind of inquiry behaviors students engage in, and that this influence realizes through the affordances of MEs, independent of whether they are physical or virtual. In particular, we examine how MEs shape college students' experimentation strategies and conceptual understanding. In study 1, students engaged in two consecutive inquiry tasks, first on mass and spring systems and then on electric circuits. They either used virtual or physical MEs. We found that the use of experimentation strategies was strongly related to conceptual understanding across tasks, but that students engaged differently in those strategies depending on what ME they used. More students engaged in productive strategies using the virtual ME for electric circuits, and vice versa using the physical ME for mass and spring systems. In study 2, we isolated the affordance of measurement uncertainty by comparing two versions of the same virtual ME for electric circuits--one with and one without noise--and found that the conditions differed in terms of productive experimentation strategies. These findings indicate that measures of inquiry processes may resolve apparent ambiguities and inconsistencies between studies on MEs that are based on learning outcomes alone.

Efforts to retain underrepresented minority (URM) students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have shown only limited success in higher education, due in part to a persistent achievement gap between students from historically underrepresented and well-represented backgrounds. To test the hypothesis that active learning disproportionately benefits URM students, we quantified the effects of traditional versus active learning on student academic performance, science self-efficacy, and sense of social belonging in a large (more than 250 students) introductory STEM course. A transition to active learning closed the gap in learning gains between non-URM and URM students and led to an increase in science self-efficacy for all students. Sense of social belonging also increased significantly with active learning, but only for non-URM students. Through structural equation modeling, we demonstrate that, for URM students, the increase in self-efficacy mediated the positive effect of active-learning pedagogy on two metrics of student performance. Our results add to a growing body of research that supports varied and inclusive teaching as one pathway to a diversified STEM workforce.

AbstractHenoch-Schönlein purpura (HSP) is a common form of IgA1-mediated blood vessel inflammation affecting mainly children. Intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) gene polymorphisms have been shown to be associated with HSP in different populations; in this study, we investigated its potential association and influence on the development of severe complications in Iranian HSP patients. Twenty-three patients diagnosed with IgAV/HSP according to the criteria of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) with 53 age- and sex-matched control subjects were referred to us. Cases and controls were genotyped using Sanger sequencing. Based on our research data, we found an association between codon 469 K/E of the ICAM1 gene and risk of HSP. Our results revealed that KK genotype and allele K are more common in control than in the HSP group, therefore the subjects with KK genotype are protected against HSP. Our data also suggested that the genotype EE is associated with higher risk of HSP progression compared to KK genotype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated inequities within higher education. This study examined how first-generation students, compared to their continuing-generation peers, navigated institutional resources such as programs and academic advising during the pandemic. To examine institutional resource barriers, usage, and helpfulness for students, the study analyzed survey data of 524 students at a four-year private university in the United States. Results showed that lack of time, awareness, and access to institutional resources were barriers for first-generation students in using institutional resources. Furthermore, qualitative findings reveal factors that first-generation students found helpful in their college career: transparency of institutional resources on campus, initiative from institutional figures in reaching out to students, and holistic support for academic, personal, and professional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic required higher education institutions to rapidly transition to Emergency Remote Instruction (ERI) with little preparation. Discussions are now underway globally to learn the lessons of COVID-19 and to use this knowledge to shape the future of learning science in higher education. In this study, we examined the experiences of instructors and students to ERI in three universities across three continents–America, Europe, and Australia. We measured the instructional strategies used by instructors including assessment types, and interaction opportunities during and outside class schedules. We also measured the learning challenges experienced by students including planning, distractions, technology, learning resources, their views on educational quality and what characterized quality interactions during ERI. Our findings suggest that most instructional strategies used by instructors changed little during ERI, although the nature of instructor and student interactions during class relied more heavily on technology. Students reported significant learning challenges which included distractions from their physical and social media environments and access to technology. Both instructors and students reported that interactions with each other and their peers were concerningly low, albeit similar to pre COVID-19 pandemic levels. There were differences in the perceptions of instructors and students on whether instructor-student interactions were better or worse online. Common among all universities, there was a large proportion of students reporting mental health and work-related stress. Lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic include ensuring more support for instructors to implement effective and equitable pedagogies and an increased recognition of the importance of practicals, and the social, interactive and hands-on aspects of learning science in higher education. We predict that the incorporation of active learning pedagogies and strategies which increase student engagement and foster a sense of belonging will be ongoing global challenges for learning science in a post COVID-19 campus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate an approach to supporting students' learning in science through a combination of physical experimentation and virtual modeling. We present a study that utilizes a scientific inquiry framework, which we call "bifocal modeling," to link student-designed experiments and computer models in real time. In this study, a group of high school students designed computer models of bacterial growth with reference to a simultaneous physical experiment they were conducting, and were able to validate the correctness of their model against the results of their experiment. Our findings suggest that as the students compared their virtual models with physical experiments, they encountered "discrepant events" that contradicted their existing conceptions and elicited a state of cognitive disequilibrium. This experience of conflict encouraged students to further examine their ideas and to seek more accurate explanations of the observed natural phenomena, improving the design of their computer models.

The studies in this special section of the "Journal of Educational Psychology" present a variety of social-psychological interventions across large numbers of classrooms and populations. They show notable benefits for many students at risk for low performance. This is the glass half-full interpretation, and we consider the strengths of the articles from this vantage. When viewed collectively, however, the results also raise a number of basic questions, the most pressing of which is, why do the interventions only benefit a particular population, when there are reasons to believe most students might benefit? This is the glass half-empty interpretation. We consider the limitations of each study from this vantage. We argue that although these studies provide important contributions, in all cases better measures and theories are necessary. We identify two related questions for the field: Why do these interventions show selective effects and fail to generalize to all students? Second, why do these very different interventions, presumably involving different psychological mechanisms, consistently result in similar selective effects? To answer these questions, a grand challenge for the field is to develop better instrumentation that can capture relevant behaviors and attitudes over time, and how these vary across context and population. With improved instrumentation, efficacy studies could rest on a much stronger foundation that would yield more confidence as to the broad benefits and replicability of large-scale social-cognitive interventions.

While learning effective problem-solving is an important goal of engineering education, "how should we teach problemsolving to engineering students?" is an ongoing challenge. In our previous works, we identified the main practices involved in solving a novel technical problem involving electrical circuits. Among these practices were reflective practices that regulate the problem-solving process by making more intentional and informed decisions. Expanding on that work, we examine in this study whether we can improve students' problem-solving by prompting their use of reflective practices. The study presented here consists of two experiments. The first experiment was conducted with 16 undergraduate students in a mechanical engineering course. Students were introduced to problem-solving reflective practices and then received prompts to engage in these practice as they worked on their weekly projects. The quality of their problem-solving was evaluated pre-and post-course using interactive electrical circuit problems embedded in an educational simulation. The improved performance in problem solving in the mechanical engineering context was observed to transfer and to improve problem-solving in the context of the electrical circuit problems. We conducted the second follow-up experiment to confirm that this improvement was the result of the prompted reflection, not simply repeated practice on the test atid/or learning about electrical circuits in between the pre- and post-course evaluation. For the second study, 70 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: practice solving electric circuit problems with prompted-reflection (PR) or receiving extra repeated-practice (RP) solving such problems, but without reflective prompts. Student problem-solving in the PR condition improved nearly twice as much as in the RP condition. Overall, the results of the study show that prompting students to reflect on their problem-solving produces problem-solving benefits greater than repeated practice and these benefits transfer across disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]