This review of 46 reports on 30 unique science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) bridge programs published over the past 25 years notes the characteristics and goals of each program and whether programs were successful in meeting their goals. A set of recommendations for STEM bridge programs is presented in hopes of encouraging development of better bridges into college.

This interview study of students who participated in a summer bridge program unexpectedly found that these students are maximizing their active-learning experiences and take an equitable approach to group work.

There has been a national movement to transition college science courses from passive lectures to active learning environments. Active learning has been shown to be a more effective way for students to learn, yet there is concern that some students are resistant to active learning approaches. Although there is much discussion about student resistance to active learning, few studies have explored this topic. Furthermore, a limited number of studies have applied theoretical frameworks to student engagement in active learning. We propose using a theoretical lens of expectancy value theory to understand student resistance to active learning. In this study, we examined student perceptions of active learning after participating in 40 hours of active learning. We used the principal components of expectancy value theory to probe student experience in active learning: student perceived self-efficacy in active learning, value of active learning, and potential cost of participating in active learning. We found that students showed positive changes in the components of expectancy value theory and reported high levels of engagement in active learning, which provide proof of concept that expectancy value theory can be used to boost student perceptions of active learning and their engagement in active learning classrooms. From these findings, we have built a theoretical framework of expectancy value theory applied to active learning.

Summer bridge programs often aim to build social connections for first-year students to ease their transition into college, yet few studies have reported on bridge programs successfully leading to these outcomes. We backward designed a summer bridge program for incoming biology majors to increase the comfort and connections among students and between students and faculty. We found that first-year students who participated in the bridge program had greater comfort and connections with faculty compared with matched students who did not participate in the bridge program. However, there were no differences in the comfort and connections with peers for students who participated in the bridge program compared with matched students who did not participate in the program. Bridge students reported specific elements of the bridge program that they perceived led to greater comfort and connections with faculty, which can help guide bridge developers in the design of their programs aimed to enhance student relationships with faculty. This study adds to the growing literature on bridge programs and demonstrates how a bridge program can be designed to lead to increased comfort and social connections with faculty.

The aim of our project, Last House on the Hill (LHotH), is to holistically reconstitute the rich multimedia and primary research data with the impressive texts of the monograph, the printed final report of the Berkeley Archaeologists at Ç atalhöyük (BACH) project, in which a team from UC Berkeley excavated a group of Neolithic 9000-year old buildings at this famous cultural heritage location in Central Anatolia, Turkey. The Last House on the Hill brings together the published text, complete project database (including all media formats such as photographs, videos, maps, line drawings), related Web sites, data and media outside the direct domain of the BACH project, and recontextualized presentations of the data as remixes, movies, and other interpretive works by BACH team members and many others. We are achieving this through an event-centered, CIDOC-CRM-compatible implementation ontology, expressed through an open-source Web publishing platform, providing open access, transparency and open-endedness to what is normally the closed and final process of monograph publication.The idea of embedding, interweaving, entangling, and otherwise linking the data and media from archaeological excavations with their interpretation and meaningful presentation in an open access sharable platform has long been an ambition of those of us working in the digital documentation of archaeological research and the public presentation of cultural heritage. Formidable barriers still exist to making it possible for projects to achieve these aims, ranging from intellectual property concerns to providing commitments to the long-term sustainability of the digital content. We believe that our event-centered implementation ontology will make it far easier for archaeologists and researchers in other disciplines to organize, manage, and share their data while gaining the significant benefits of the CIDOC-CRM framework.This article describes the strategy, goals, architecture, and implementation for the project, emphasizing the novel and innovative approaches that were required to make the project successful.