Citizen science has the potential to promote an understanding of science and to represent science in school authentically. Still, its implementation into formal education encounters tensions between scientific and educational goals. Factors for success and hindrances of the implementation of citizen science projects in the classroom can be…

Although there is a push to provide more student agency in science classrooms, teachers and students may become frustrated when inquiry activities and equipment do not work as planned--teachers because of the time crunch to "cover" topics and students because of the perceived lack of value in activities that are "off task." In…

Many students consume energy drinks without knowing or thinking about the adverse side effects. The purpose of this article is to share student procedures and results after testing the effects of a popular energy drink, Red Bull, on Dugesia Dorotocephala planarians (flatworms). Planarians are animals with neurotransmitters systems that are similar…

Innovative education approaches include citizen science projects that allow students to participate in locally relevant scientific work, connecting content to the real world. Global collaboration provides students with a broader perspective on local issues, allowing students to become more globally aware.

Building a robot from scratch in an educational context can be a challenging prospect. While a multitude of projects exist that simplify the electronics and software aspects of a robot, the same cannot be said for construction systems for robotics. In this paper, we present our efforts to create a low-cost do-it-yourself construction system for…

We have conducted an education project to communicate the wave energy concept to high school students. A virtual reality system that combines both hardware and software is developed in this project to simulate the buoy-wave interaction. This first-of-its-kind wave energy unit is portable and physics-based, allowing students to conduct a number of…

The German science project "NAWI-Interaktiv" is an example of innovative use of E-Learning and new media education. Since 2009, the learning platform provides learners and teachers with high-quality learning tools, teaching material, useful information and E-learning programs for free. This is to raise the pupils' motivation to learn…

We describe an interactive collaborative environmental education project that makes advanced laboratory facilities at Brookhaven National Laboratory accessible for one-year or multi-year science projects for the high school level. Cyber-enabled Environmental Science (CEES) utilizes web conferencing software to bring multi-disciplinary,…

In order to understand better the role of affect in learning about socio-scientific issues (SSI), this study investigated Year 12 students' emotional arousal as they participated in an online writing-to-learn science project about the socio-scientific issue of biosecurity. Students wrote a series of hybridised scientific narratives, or BioStories,…

Background and purpose: This study examines secondary-school students' opinions on participating in authentic science projects which are part of an international EU project on climate change research in seven countries. Partnerships between schools and research institutes result in student projects, in which students work with and learn from…

Providing equitable learning opportunities for all students has been a persistent issue for some time. This is evident by the science achievement gap that still exists between male and female students as well as between White and many non-White student populations (NCES, 2007, 2009, 2009b) and an underrepresentation of female, African-American,…

This article describes key facets of the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE), a curriculum that emerged in the United Kingdom, enabling teachers to accelerate the process of cognitive development so that more students could attain the higher-order thinking skills (formal operational thinking) required (Lecky, 2012). CASE, also…

This booklet discusses some of the basic facts about nuclear energy and provides eight experiments related to these facts. The experiments (which include lists of materials needed and procedures used) involve: (1) an oil-drop model of a splitting atom; (2) a domino model of a chain reaction; (3) observing radioactivity with an electroscope; (4)…

Describes how to construct a simple pendulum seismometer. Includes schematic drawing of the electronic circuitry, a working drawing of the apparatus, and typical seismometer outputs caused by nearby trains and various earthquake-generated waves. (JJK)