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1. Increasing Student Interaction with an eTextbook using Programmed Instruction

   Mohammed, Mostafa; Shaffer, Clifford A. (June 2021, Proceedings of Third Workshop on Intelligent Textbooks (iTextbooks))

   null (Ed.)

   Textbooks for theory courses in CS tend to be heavy on prose and mathematics. We find that students do not engage such material, and skip or rush through it without understanding. To increase students level of engagement, we developed support within the OpenDSA eTextbook system support for creating materials based on the Programmed Instruction pedagogical paradigm. This requires near-constant activity by the student, who must read a little, ideally a sentence or a paragraph, and then answer a question or complete an exercise related to that information. Based on the question response, students are permitted to continue, or must retry to solve the exercise. Versions of the eTextbook have been used to teach the senior-level Formal Languages course at Virginia Tech for two semesters. In this demonstration, we show how students interact with material developed using the Programmed Instruction approach. 

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2. Containerizing an eTextbook Infrastructure

   Hicks, Alexander; Shaffer, Clifford A. (June 2021, Proceedings of the 5th Educational Data Mining in Computer Science Education (CSEDM) Workshop)

   null (Ed.)

   The CS Education community has developed many educational tools in recent years, such as interactive exercises. Often the developer makes them freely available for use, hosted on their own server, and usually they are directly accessible within the instructor's LMS through the LTI protocol. As convenient as this can be, instructors using these third-party tools for their courses can experience issues related to data access and privacy concerns. The tools typically collect clickstream data on student use. But they might not make it easy for the instructor to access these data, and the institution might be concerned about privacy violations. While the developers might allow and even support local installation of the tool, this can be a difficult process unless the tool carefully designed for third-party installation. And integration of small tools within larger frameworks (like a type of interactive exercise within an eTextbook framework) is also difficult without proper design. This paper describes an ongoing containerization effort for the OpenDSA eTextbook project. Our goal is both to serve our needs by creating an easier-to-manage decomposition of the many tools and sub-servers required by this complex system, and also to provide an easily installable production environment that instructors can run locally. This new system provides better access to developer-level data analysis tools and potentially removes many FERPA-related privacy concerns. We also describe our efforts to integrate Caliper Analytics into OpenDSA to expand the data collection and analysis services. We hope that our containerization architecture can help provide a roadmap for similar projects to follow 

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3. Development, validation and in-class evaluation of a sequence of clicker questions on Larmor precession of spin in quantum mechanics

   https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2019.pr.Justice  

   Justice, Paul; Marshman, Emily; Singh, Chandralekha (January 2020, Development, validation and in-class evaluation of a sequence of clicker questions on Larmor precession of spin in quantum mechanics)

   Engaging students with well-designed clicker questions is one of the commonly used research-based instructional strategy in physics courses partly because it has a relatively low barrier to implementation. Moreover, validated robust sequences of clicker questions are likely to provide better scaffolding support and guidance to help students build a good knowledge structure of physics than an individual clicker question on a particular topic. Here we discuss the development, validation and in-class implementation of a clicker question sequence (CQS) for helping advanced undergraduate students learn about Larmor precession of spin, which takes advantage of the learning goals and inquiry-based guided learning sequences in a previously validated Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT). The in-class evaluation of the CQS using peer instruction is discussed by comparing upper-level undergraduate students’ performance after traditional lecture-based instruction and after engaging with the CQS. 

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4. Improving student understanding of quantum measurement in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space using a research-based multiple-choice question sequence

   https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.21.010104  

   Li, Yangqiuting; Singh, Chandralekha (January 2025, Physical Review Physics Education Research)

   [This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] Research-based multiple-choice questions implemented in class with peer instruction have been shown to be an effective tool for improving students’ engagement and learning outcomes. Moreover, multiple-choice questions that are carefully sequenced to build on each other can be particularly helpful for students to develop a systematic understanding of concepts pertaining to a theme. Here, we discuss the development, validation, and implementation of a multiple-choice question sequence (MQS) on the topic of quantum measurement in the context of wave functions in the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. This MQS was developed using students’ common difficulties with quantum measurements as a guide and was implemented in a junior-/senior-level quantum mechanics course at a large research university in the U.S. We compare student performance on assessment tasks focusing on quantum measurement before and after the implementation of the MQS and discuss how different difficulties were reduced and how to further improve students’ conceptual understanding of quantum measurement in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. Published by the American Physical Society2025 

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5. An at-home Plant Physiology laboratory applied to dark-induced leaf senescence by college students and science teachers

   https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.07.630824  

   Soumen, Shejal; Kolstoe, Alexander J; Duncan, Nora E; Termolen, Isaac P; Solloway, Amanda M; Lu, Yan (January 2025, bioRxiv)

   Dark-induced leaf senescence is an extreme example of leaf senescence induced by light deprivation. Prolonged dark treatments of individual leaves result in chlorophyll degradation, macromolecule catabolism, and reduction of photosynthesis. In this work, we described an at-home Dark-induced Leaf Senescence laboratory exercise for a junior-level undergraduate Plant Physiology course. To perform the dark-induced senescence assay on attached leaves, students may cover individual leaves of an outdoor plant with aluminum foils and record the leaf morphology with controlled vocabularies for ~9 days. To perform senescence assays on detached leaves, the students may incubate detached leaves in various aqueous solutions (e.g., tap water, sucrose solution, alkali solution, and acid solution) either in the dark or under natural light, and then record the leaf morphology with controlled vocabularies for ~9 days. This laboratory exercise provides hands-on opportunities for students to understand the relationships among sunlight, chlorophyll, and photosynthesis, in the comfort of students' own homes. Specifically, it helps students to comprehend intrinsic and dark-induced leaf senescence mechanisms, the effects of sugars on leaf senescence, and the importance of optimal pH to plant health. This laboratory exercise can be adapted to support inquiry-based learning or be implemented in a middle or high school classroom. 

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