Nordic Journal of STEM Education

Innføring av studentaktive læringsmetoder for å utvide studentenes forståelse av programmering

T. F. Brustad — 2025-03-24

Many students associate programming with writing code in a programming language, but the programming process is much more than coding. Programming is a way of thinking, decomposing, and solving problems, where there is usually no single correct answer. In teaching programming subjects, it can sometimes be difficult to get students to plan and reflect on the choices they make when coding, and they often end up choosing the first solution they find. In this project, a pilot study was conducted where two different student-active learning methods were implemented in a programming course. The methods are intended to help students understand that programming is more than coding and to teach them various parts of the programming process. The two activities used in the project are brain teasers and oral assignment, both of which encourage creativity, reflection, and problem-solving among students.

Engineering Students’ Experiences with GeoGebra and Student-Produced Screencast Assignments in Mathematics

P. Persson — 2025-02-12

This paper reports on engineering students’ experiences from the introduction of GeoGebra/screencast assignments in two Mathematics 1 courses for engineering students. The purpose of the assignments was to help students gain a deeper conceptual understanding of mathematics by letting the students explore the mathematics in GeoGebra and to increase student engagement by asking them to present their knowledge in a screencast. The results show that students believe that they gain a better understanding of the topics compared to normal calculation assignments but that some challenges such as discomfort when presenting orally and the time required are prominent.

Student-Produced Films in Laboratory Courses as Learning Incentive and Exam Option

L-I. Berglund — 2025-02-12

An increasingly digitalized society demands that both educators and students master the use of digital tools in all teaching and learning activities. In laboratory-based courses, the practical elements of teaching are difficult to digitalize without sacrificing the important hands-on experience, leaving the remaining components such as seminars, reports or exams as possibilities where the classical concepts can be supplemented or replaced by digital solutions. In this paper we report on the use of digital film production as an alternative option for written laboratory reports and a means to intensify the learning outcome from practical experiments. Films were produced by students of the Bachelor course “Green Biotechnology and Bioenergy” on selected parts of the course. Simple and budget-friendly measures were implemented to carry out the filming. The films replaced the laboratory reports for the respective experiments. A seminar served as an interactive platform for the students to present their films to their fellow students and exchange feedback before the films were assessed by evaluators as part of the examination. The pedagogical benefits of this teaching method and its suitability as an assessment form were later analyzed to shed light on the question if student-produced films are a promising way to impart digital expertise effectively while acquiring practical skills in an informative and creative manner. Beyond advocating student-produced films as a possible exam concept for practical courses, our article demonstrates that self-executed filming was able to provide a more creative, interactive, and thus more motivating teaching atmosphere with mutually advantageous learning experiences for all parties involved.

STEM students prefer assessment practices known to reduce the impact of test anxiety

R.A. Costello — 2025-02-26

Undergraduate introductory STEM courses often rely on few, high-stakes exams to assess student learning. This assessment strategy engenders high test anxiety and negatively impacts academic performance. We know little about how students want to be assessed—particularly those who experience high test anxiety. Applying a humanist learning framework, we asked students at a university in Norway to envision their ideal assessment practice. Our analyses affirm that test anxious students performed worse in their STEM courses, and students with marginalized identities in STEM were more test anxious. Additionally, we found that students overwhelmingly want more assessments. We also found that first-generation students, a student group rarely studied in Norway, want different types of assessments to replace high-stakes exams. In sum, student preferences aligned with assessment practices known to reduce the impact of test anxiety. Our results support calls for creating STEM environments where student voices are valued.

Experiences with an interactive boardgame that teaches elements of a basic automatic control course

D. Rotondo — 2025-03-07

Games are key pedagogical activities that engage students in problem-solving, critical thinking, and analytical ways of thinking. This paper introduces how we integrated Zendo, a game of inductive logic, into our teaching practices. To explore the impact, we collected the data from students in their active engagement with the interactive boardgame learning environment using a quantitative survey as well as an open-ended questionnaire where 16 students documented their in-context experiences, perceptions, and responses. We analysed the quantitative data through descriptive analysis while inductively coding the qualitative data to reveal the impact of the game on the students. The quantitative analysis showed a positive impact of the game on five different constructs related to learning, such as affective factors, collaborative learning, higher order thinking, and metacognition, while the qualitative data revealed four categories including low stake learning environment, collaboration and socio-cultural influences, awareness of own inductive learning, and inspiration for learning, supporting traditional approaches. These appeared to be aligned with the sociocultural perspective, based on the idea that social interaction plays a crucial role in learning. The collected experiences show that games may supplement traditional homework, providing a learning environment that triggers students’ cognitive (reflect and internalize) and social (interact and socialize) processes, an essential supporting element of learning. Through the lens of social culture, it not only enhances student engagement but also facilitates collaborative learning experiences. Additionally, within the framework of socio-constructivism, gamification serves as a powerful tool to foster active participation, social interaction, and the co-creation of knowledge among students.

Different forms of assessment in computer science education and their correlation with grades.

E.B. Abrahamsen — 2025-03-20

Various studies have focused on the relationship between grades and the different forms of assessment used in higher education. To contribute to these discussions, in this article we have analysed the relationship between form of assessment and grade in computer science and electrical engineering courses at the University of Stavanger. These are common courses in modern universities, not only in Norway, and represent a combination of skill- and competence-oriented courses. As a basis for examining the differences between grades and forms of assessment, we focus on grade distributions. In addition, attention is also paid to the differences in the proportion of students with the best and the lowest grades, for different forms of assessment. We show that there is a difference between forms of assessment and average grade. Furthermore, the proportion of students with the best and the lowest grades is largely affected by the form of assessment.

Short introductory videos for elaborative encoding of physics principles

V. Gjerde — 2025-03-21

Introductory videos play a vital role in enabling active learning in the flipped classroom model, but guidelines for their content and structure are lacking, especially regarding specific learning processes. To address this gap, we developed a series of introductory videos intended to stimulate elaborative encoding of new physics principles. Over 60 introductory videos were produced, each covering a single physics principle or definition. These videos featured a brief intro, a pretest with elaborative encoding questions, answers to each question, a posttest, and an equation retrieval prompt. In a course with approximately 150 students, we conducted student interviews (n = 13) and surveys from two cohorts (n = 50 and 44). The students varied in how and whether they engaged with the videos. Several students noticed a large difference in how much they learned from lectures. The students felt that the videos provided a good overview and made it easier to learn the content of the course. Furthermore, 73% of the survey respondents would be "very disappointed" if they lost access to the videos, underscoring their perceived importance in the learning process. Our framework for introductory videos in physics can make it easier for lecturers to incorporate a flipped classroom approach with videos.

Mind the Gender Gap

J. Lindström Månefjord — 2025-03-24

Gender inequality in the academic context is influenced by implicit bias – namely the process of automatic associations. Implicit gender biases might influence teaching, assessment, review, and recruitment processes and hence equality within higher education. Data on the extent to which implicit gender bias in relation to career choices is present in the general population has been collected during many years in the web-based Project Implicit but has not, to the best of our knowledge, yet been investigated among teaching staff in a STEM-focused faculty at a Swedish university. In this study, we measured the implicit gender bias of 51 participants with teaching experience, ranging from doctoral students to professors at the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University (LTH). Our results show that implicit gender bias – where men are more closely associated with STEM subjects and women with liberal arts subjects – is present, even though the majority did not indicate beforehand that they explicitly associate either men or women with STEM. We further show that our results compare well to those of Project Implicit. The main takeaways from this paper are: there is a widespread issue of implicit gender bias among teaching staff at LTH and the population at large; and there is a dire need for increased awareness of such mechanisms to approach the goal of a gender-equal academic environment.