Virtual laboratory simulations are commercially available to train students; these creative resources are available to complete remotely without traditional time and safety restrictions of laboratory-based practical classes. We introduced a Health and Safety virtual laboratory simulation to a core large first-year science module. Having surveyed…

There is increasingly a call for clinical relevance in the teaching of the biomedical sciences within all health care programs. This presupposes that there is an understanding of what is "core" material within the curriculum. To date, the anatomical sciences have been poorly served by the development of core syllabuses, although there…

Historically, teacher-assigned grades have been seen as unreliable subjective measures of academic knowledge, since grades and standardized tests have traditionally correlated at about the 0.5 to 0.6 level, and thus explain about 25-35% of each other. However, emerging literature indicates that grades may be a multidimensional assessment of both…

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has commissioned studies of state academic standards in five core subjects. This is the fifth of these studies, focusing on state standards for science. Thirty-six states presented standards for evaluation. Some states were in the process of revising standards, while others simply had no standards to present.…