The School of Education and the Department of Physics at Boston University offer a sequence of 10 two-credit professional development courses through the Improving the Teaching of Physics (ITOP) project. The ITOP courses combine physics content, readings from the physics education research (PER) literature, and the conceptual history of physics…

The purpose of this bounded single-case study was to explore the understanding of the nature and process of science for undergraduate students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). The study investigated one professor's methodology to explicitly teach undergraduate students about the nature and process of science, and documented their…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of structured note-taking compared to traditional note-taking on the acquisition of scientific knowledge for students with and without learning disabilities (LD) and students with reading difficulties (RD). An additional purpose was to examine whether the two note-taking methods…

This dissertation is a combination of two research areas, experimental physical chemistry, Chapters I to V, and chemical education, Chapters VI to VII. Chapters I to V describe research on the water-mediated chemistry of oxidized atmospheric molecules and the impact that water has on the spectra of these environmental systems. The role of water…

Modern science education reform recommends that teachers provide K-12 science students a more complete picture of the scientific enterprise, one that lies beyond content knowledge and centers more on the processes and culture of scientists. In the case of Research Experience for Teachers (RET) programs, the "teacher" becomes "researcher" and it is…

Efforts have been made to enhance teachers' understanding and teaching of NOS and/or SI by immersing teachers into the field and lab work of scientists through intensive summer institutes. Results have been mixed and the samples have been small. This may be due to several factors: implicit strategies to learn and teach about NOS and/or SI…

Citizen Science projects offer opportunities for non-scientists to take part in scientific research. Scientific results from these projects have been well documented. However, there is limited research about how these projects affect their volunteer participants. In this study, I investigate how participation in an online, collaborative…

Microchannel heat exchangers are gaining popularity due to their ability to handle high pressures, reduce refrigerant charge, and reduce heat exchanger package size. These heat exchanger designs provide better heat exchange performance due to increased refrigerant side heat transfer coefficients and geometries that allow for a denser packing…

Part I. The design and development of organic second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) materials have attracted much interest due to their applications in optoelectronic devices and modern communications technology. Donor-pi-acceptor compounds, D-(CH=CH)[subscript n]-A, often exhibit hyperpolarizability that results in laser frequency doubling (second…

The purpose of this study was to determine which of three competing models will provide, reliable, interpretable, and responsive measures of elementary students' understanding of the nature of science (NOS). The Nature of Science Instrument-Elementary (NOSI-E), a 28-item Rasch-based instrument, was used to assess students' NOS…

This study investigated whether participation in the Partnership for Research and Education in Plants (PREP), a long-term authentic plant research project, in conjunction with explicit verses implicit instruction can change high school students' conceptions of the nature of science (NOS). The participants included a total of 134 students comprised…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)'s emphasis of reading, language arts, and mathematics (RLA&M) and its de-emphasis of science has been a source of great concern among educators. Through an objectivist and constructionist framework, this study explored the unforeseen effects of the NCLB on public science education among Title I (TI) and…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of a socioscientific issues-based instructional model on secondary agricultural education students' content knowledge, scientific reasoning ability, argumentation skills, and views of the nature of science. This study utilized a pre-experimental, single group pretest-posttest design to assess…

Understanding the ways in which scientific knowledge develops, or the epistemology of science, is believed to be a crucial component of scientific literacy. This construct is more formally known as Nature of Science (NOS) within the science education community. The merits of three different approaches to NOS teaching and learning in the context of…

Although teacher educators have successfully helped K-12 teachers' develop adequate views of NOS, their views have not been transferred to their students. It is evident that K-12 students' understanding of NOS still does not align with the recommendation of the reforms document, indicating that holding an adequate view of NOS is…