Publications by authors named "Eric Pennino"

In higher education, syllabi have traditionally served as written contracts between instructors and their students, providing first-hand information about the course and expectations. Reading the syllabus may provide students with first impressions or mental images of the instructor, thereby initiating a student-instructor relationship even before any interaction has occurred. Instructors can use syllabi to directly communicate values and practices of equity and inclusion, but students can perceive indirect messages through tone and language that may support or contradict stated values.

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Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) are attractive solutions for scaling undergraduate research experiences at primarily undergraduate teaching institutions, where resources for faculty research activities can be limited. The Sustainable Interdisciplinary Research to Inspire Undergraduate Success (SIRIUS) project is a unique program that integrates CUREs, coordinated around a local real-world problem, throughout a biology department's curricula. The CUREs are scaffolded to provide all biology majors with multiple opportunities to engage in scientific investigations as they advance through introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses.

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The sudden shift to online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic left many instructors wondering how to minimize anxiety while keeping students engaged in their virtual courses. In this study, we explored (i) specific online instructional tasks that caused students to experience anxiety, (ii) factors that hindered student engagement with online instruction, and (iii) changes in student anxiety and engagement between spring 2020 and fall 2020. Students enrolled in STEM classes were surveyed at the end of spring 2020 (N = 425) and fall 2020 (N = 347) semesters.

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