Institute of Education

There is an increasing interest in conducting reading-related studies through metacognitive lens. In order to explore the trends in such studies, we conducted content analysis of 29 articles in the Social Science Citation Index journals from 1998 to 2012 regarding the relationship between science reading and metacognition. The results show important cross-study evidences that most researchers have applied a mixed methods approach (68.97%), used instructional cues as an intervention (48.28%), and collected both performance and process data (48.28%). The summary figures based on the framework of the COPES model (Winnie and Hadwin, 1998) indicated: (1) there was no study exploring the relationships among control, monitoring, cognitive evaluations, and operations; (2) only one study focused on the effect of motivation. It is suggested that future studies not only focus on the effect of cognitive self-regulation but also that of motivational self-regulation on science reading.

Objective: In countries such as the USA, colleges and universities are focusing on how best to serve their students in tough fiscal times and a highly competitive marketplace. Boise State University has specifically focused on providing online courses as one option to meet student needs. However, more recently, Boise State began developing high-enrollment online courses to resolve bottlenecks in enrolments, while maintaining robust, interactive, and engaging learning experiences.
Design: A mixed-method case study. Setting: Three high-enrollment health studies online courses offered at a 4-year university in Boise, Idaho, USA.
Method: A systemic analysis of final course evaluations, student grades, and course reports from the Learning Management System were examined to investigate the effectiveness and student perceptions of high enrolment online courses.
Results: Findings provide support that offering the high-enrollment courses met enrollment demand, provided quality instruction, and maintained student satisfaction.
Conclusions: We present student perceptions of three high-enrolment health studies online courses. Lesson learned and suggestions for faculty members, instructional designers, and administrators are provided along the way.

Student evaluations of teaching provide a wealth of information about students’ experiences in higher education. Colleges and universities, though, as a whole, need to spend more time mining these evaluations to better understand student perceptions of their college coursework. These evaluations are especially helpful to better understand students’ experiences in online courses, which, despite continued growth, are still relatively new for most faculty and students. The analysis of seven years of student evaluations at a metropolitan research university is presented in the following article. The purpose of the analysis was to better discern students’ experiences online as well as to address commonly held assumptions about online learning (e.g., that teaching evaluations are lower for online courses). Results indicate that students in this sample actually do rate online courses lower than face-to-face courses. The article concludes with situating these results in the larger student evaluation literature as well as addressing larger implications of these results for practice.