The purpose of this study is to investigate student interactions with simulations, and teacher support of those interactions, within naturalistic high school physics classroom settings. This study focuses on data from two lesson sequences that were conducted in several physics classrooms. The lesson sequences were conducted in a whole class discussion format in approximately half of the class sections and in a hands-on-computer small group format in matched class sections. Analysis used a mixed methods approach where: (1) quantitative methods were used to evaluate pre-post data; (2) open coding and selective coding were used for transcript analysis; and (3) comparative case studies were used to consider the quantitative and qualitative data in light of each other and to suggested possible explanations. Although teachers expressed the expectation that the small group students would learn more, no evidence was found in pre-post analysis for an advantage for the small group sections. Instead, a slight trend was observed in favor of the whole class discussion sections, especially for students in the less advanced sections. In seeking to explain these results, qualitative analyses of transcript and videotape data were conducted, revealing that many more episodes of support for interpreting visual elements of the simulations occurred in the whole class setting than in the matched small group discussions; not only teachers, but, at times, students used more visual support moves in the whole class discussion setting. In addition, concepts that had been identified as key were discussed for longer periods of time in the whole class setting than in the matched small group discussions in six of nine matched sets. For one of the lesson sequences, analysis of student work on in-class activity sheets identified no evidence that any of the Honors or College Preparatory students in the small groups had made use in their thinking of the key features of the sophisticated and popular physics simulation they had used, while such evidence was identified in the work of many of the whole class students. Analysis of the whole class discussions revealed a number of creative teaching strategies in use by the teachers that may have helped offset the advantage of hands-on experience with the simulations and animations enjoyed by the small group students. These results suggest that there may exist whole class teaching strategies for promoting at least some of the active thinking and exploration that has been considered to be the strength of small group work, and appear to offer encouragement to teachers who do not have the resources to allow their classes to engage regularly in small group work at the computer. Furthermore, these examples suggest the somewhat surprising possibility that there may be certain instructional situations where there is an advantage to spending at least part of the time with a simulation or animation in a whole class discussion mode.

This work introduces a series of papers developed to explore the case for change in dental education. Three issues facing dental education are (a) the challenging financial environment of higher education, making dental schools very expensive and tuition-intensive for universities to operate and producing high debt levels for students, which limits access to education and restricts career choices; (b) the profession's apparent loss of vision for taking care of the oral health needs of all components of society and the resultant potential for marginalization of dentistry as a specialized health care service available only to the affluent; and (c) the nature of dental school education itself, which has been described as convoluted, expensive, and often deeply dissatisfying to its students. The theoretical rational for this work is that developing dental faculty from solely clinicians to academicians will allow for the curricular change so needed in dental education. Furthermore, it is curricular change that can lead to changes in the oral health profession.My work first explores the scientific nature of research into dental education to determine its ability to advance the profession. This study found that while there has been a small increase in the amount of rigorous dental education research in the past 10 years, it remains a small percentage of the overall research completed in the field. We then researched the effect of pedagogical training for dental clinicians and discovered predictors for those faculty members more likely to alter their methods to be more student centered. Our narrative research into faculty resistors (those unwilling to change) allowed us to identify themes that can alter our approach to future faculty development. And finally, we researched the effect of modern pedagogy on a course in the dental school curriculum. This research allowed us to justify curricular changes that improve efficiency and student performance.

In order to arrive at informed judgments about the quality of research institutions and individual scholars, funding agencies, academic employers and researchers have turned to publication rankings. While such rankings, often based on journal citations, promise a more efficient and transparent funding allocation, individual researchers are at risk of showing adaptive behavior. This paper investigates whether the use of journal rankings in assessing the quality of scholarly research results in the unintended consequence of researchers adapting their research topics to the publishing interests of high-ranked journals. The introduction of the Handelsblatt Ranking (HBR) for economists in German language institutions serves as a quasi-natural experiment, allowing for an examination of research topic dynamics in economics via topic modeling and text classification. It is found that the Handelsblatt Ranking did not cause a significant shift of topics researched by German-affiliated authors in comparison to their international counterparts, even though topic convergence is apparent.

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<p>  </p> <p>Over the years it has become more common for practitioners to use the NGSS scientific practices to inform curricula at the undergraduate level. One of these practices is argumentation, the process of engaging in argument from evidence. Argumentation is an important part of the scientific process because scientists must make claims about their research and then provide justification using evidence to support those claims. While being able to argue your claim based on evidence is a common occurrence for scientists, it is rarely something students engage with in general level courses. In order to incorporate argumentation in the classroom the Claim, Evidence, Reasoning (CER) framework was adopted to develop the argumentation materials. </p> <p>In this study, aspects of the CER framework have been adapted and incorporated into the existing curriculum of a second-semester general chemistry non-majors course. The changes include lecture discussions, worksheets, and exam questions to help scaffold and facilitate students’ argumentation development. In the spring 2020 and 2021 semesters, 80 students in each course were tracked through their CER assessments to gain insight into how students construct arguments. The arguments were analyzed based on completeness, correctness, and complexity. The results show support for the effectiveness of the curriculum intervention and were used to make recommendations for instructors using the CER framework and identify future areas of research.</p>