Productive problem solving, concept construction, and sense making occur through the core process of abstraction. Although the capacity for domain-general abstraction is developed at a young age, the role of abstraction in increasingly complex and disciplinary environments, such as those encountered in undergraduate STEM education, is not well…

Students in a beginning level undergraduate classical mechanics course engaged in collaborative inquiry through the "Windwalker Project". The aim of this project was for students to create a free-standing movable structure as a way of testing and applying their understanding of the conceptual and theoretical elements of the course. This…

This is the start of a road map for the effective introduction of inquiry-based learning in chemistry. Advantages of inquiry-based approaches to the development of scientific literacy are widely discussed in the literature. However, unless chemistry educators take account of teachers' reservations and identified disadvantages such approaches will…