Assistant Professor in Residence University of Connecticut, Connecticut, United States
Program Abstract: Introductory courses often serve as a gateway course for many STEM majors, especially underserved students (Stitzel & Raje, 2022). With an aim to enhance the performance of underperforming students on exams and thus persistence (Harris et al., 2020), the focus of the current study is on integrating three pedagogical practices: (a) Early low-stakes exam followed by a class period on incorporating metacognition for higher order college learning (Cook et al., 2013) (b) Wrappers providing opportunities to practice metacognition after every exam (Hodges et al., 2020) (c) Scaffolded grading where repetitive assessment of key learning concepts is performed (Snow, 1993). We show that the preliminary results from an introductory biology course are promising.
