Being immersed in the processes of research can develop undergraduate students' science identities and support their persistence in pursuing science careers. However, it can be difficult for students to find opportunities for engaging in authentic scientific research. The professional staff and scientific objects in natural history museums provide…

Campus shutdowns during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic posed unique challenges to faculty and students engaged in laboratory courses. Formerly hands-on experiments had to be quickly pivoted to emergency remote learning. While some resources existed prior to this period, many currently available online modules and/or simulations focus on a single…

Bioinformatics was recently introduced as a module for both undergraduate and postgraduate biological sciences students at our institution. Our experience shows that inquiry-based hands-on exercises provide the most efficient approach to bioinformatic straining. In this article, we report a structural bioinformatics project carried out by Master…

In this activity, students are given the opportunity to combine skills in math and geometry for a biology lesson in the cell cycle. Students utilize the data they collect and analyze from an online onion-root-tip activity to create a paper-plate time clock representing a 24-hour cell cycle. By dividing the paper plate into appropriate phases of…

Earth's easily seen surface features (mountains, volcanoes, and islands)--and the movement of the tectonic plates that lie below--offer hints about the processes that produced them. Inquiries in seismology, the study of earthquakes and other ground movements, can help students learn about Earth's geologic processes. This article describes an…

Student response systems (SRSs) are wireless answering devices that enable students to provide simple real-time feedback to instructors. This study aims to evaluate the effects of different SRS interaction modes on elementary school students' science learning. Three interaction modes which include SRS Individual, SRS Collaborative, and Classroom…

Despite the importance of scientific inquiry in science education, researchers and educators disagree considerably regarding what features define this instructional approach. While a large body of literature addresses theoretical considerations, numerous empirical studies investigate scientific inquiry on quite different levels of detail and also…

In this activity, students learned scientific practices and evidence-based reasoning by formulating and testing hypotheses about factors affecting human reaction time and examining those hypotheses with data from ruler-drop tests. The project aligns with all eight of the science and engineering practices (SEP) embodied in the "Next Generation…

In recent science education, experimentation features ever more strongly as a method of inquiry in science classes rather than as a means to illustrate phenomena. Ideas and materials to teach inquiry abound. Yet, tools for assessing students' achievement in their processes of experimentation are lacking. The present study assumes a basal,…

Oftentimes physics is portrayed as merely a list of facts that we know about the world around us, when in fact it is a way of knowing about that world. At times physics claims to understand the inner working of objects that cannot be directly observed, such as the core of the planets and Sun, or the structure of an atom. It is important for…

Despite difficulties understanding the dynamics of complex systems only simple dynamical systems without feedback connections have been taught in secondary school physics. Consequently, students do not have opportunities to develop intuition of temporal development of systems, whose dynamics are conditioned by the influence of feedback processes.…

A total of 967 students (males and females) from four secondary schools in Vysocina region of Czechia were interviewed via 24-question Likert-type questionnaire to assess student's environmental awareness and perceptions. The generalized linear models were used to test if (and to what extent) student perceptions related to environment are/or not…

A laboratory experiment was designed for undergraduate students, in which the outcome of an easy single-step organic synthesis with well-defined conditions was not elucidated until the end of the exercise. In class, students predict and discuss the possible products using their knowledge of reaction mechanisms. In the laboratory, they learn how to…

This exercise demonstrates the principle of parsimony in constructing cladograms. Although it is designed using mammalian cranial characters, the activity could be adapted for characters from any group of organisms. Students score categorical traits on skulls and record the data in a spreadsheet. Using the Mesquite software package, students…

By the end of primary school, we might expect children to be able to give a reasonable description of what science is. In their response to the question "What is science?", Eshach and Fried (2005) distinguish between conceptual and procedural knowledge and understanding. They explain that children's conceptual knowledge is developed…