1This article describes how, by incorporating NASA's Students' Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL) project into a problem-based learning (PBL) activity, middle school students are engaged in authentic scientific research where they observe and record information about clouds and contribute ground truth data to NASA's Clouds and the Earth's…

The capacitance versus voltage relationship (the "C-V" characteristic) of a varicap is determined, and the device is used for tuning an "LC" circuit and for building a voltage-controlled oscillator. With a data-acquisition system, the "C-V" characteristic can be demonstrated in a short time. The necessary equipment includes a function generator,…

Springs are used for a wide range of applications in physics and engineering. Possibly, one of their most common uses is to study the nature of restoring forces in oscillatory systems. While experiments that verify Hooke's law using springs are abundant in the physics literature, those that explore the combination of several springs together are…

Physics students are usually unaware of the limitations and functions of related principles, and they tend to adopt "hot formulas" inappropriately. This paper introduces four real-life examples for bridging five principles, from fluids to thermodynamics, including (1) buoyant force, (2) thermal expansion, (3) the ideal-gas law, (4) the 1st law,…

This research investigates the influence of computer simulations (virtual experiments) on one hand and real experiments on the other hand on the conceptual understanding of electrical charging. The investigated sample consists of students in the second year (10th grade) of three gymnasiums in Macedonia. There were two experimental groups and one…

A small group of high school students performed a virtual laboratory experiment in Second Life that mimicked a real experiment in both its appearance and procedure. Lab report grades were equivalent to report grades for hands-on experiments, and the quality of students' results was similar. Results of an attitudinal survey show that students…

We describe a third-year undergraduate course that focuses on multiscale modeling and protein folding and has as its primary goal the encouragement of students to integrate thinking across and beyond disciplinary boundaries. The ability to perform innovative and successful research work in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…

Many students perceive science to be a difficult subject and are minimally engaged in learning it. This article describes a lesson that embedded an activity to engage students in learning science. It also identifies features of a science lesson that are likely to enhance students' engagement and learning of science and possibly reverse students'…

The study reviewed in this paper examined the effects of "mastery learning" and "student team learning" on the math achievement of high school students. The analysis included 588 ninth-grade students in 16 urban Philadelphia high schools. The study assessed the effectiveness of the different conditions after one year by…

We study the greenhouse effect on a model satellite consisting of a tungsten sphere surrounded by a thin spherical, concentric glass shell, with a small gap between the sphere and the shell. The system sits in vacuum and is heated by sunlight incident along the "z"-axis. This development is a generalization of the simple treatment of the…

Multidisciplinary cooperation in health care requires a solid knowledge in the basic sciences for a common ground of communication. In speech pathology, these fundamentals improve the accuracy of descriptive diagnoses and support the development of new therapeutic techniques and strategies. The aim of this study is to briefly discuss the benefits…

In physics teacher education, two central goals are first to learn the structures of physics knowledge, and second the processes of its construction. To know the structure is to know the framework of concepts and laws; to know the processes is to know where the knowledge comes from, how the framework is constructed, and how it can be justified.…

The purpose of this article is to elaborate Cottrill et al.'s (1996) conceptual framework of limit, an explanatory model of how students might come to understand the limit concept. Drawing on a retrospective analysis of 2 teaching experiments, we propose 2 theoretical constructs to account for the students' success in formulating and understanding…

Socratic dialogue-inducing (SDI) labs are based on Arnold Arons' half-century of ethnographic research, listening carefully to students' responses to probing Socratic questions on physics, science, and ways of thinking, and culminating in his landmark "Teaching Introductory Physics." They utilize "interactive engagement" methods and are designed,…

Creating inquiry activities is inherently difficult. Asking meaningful questions requires both background knowledge on the part of the students and complexity on the part of the phenomena. Yet numerous strategies can help teachers conduct inquiry activities. In this article, the authors share a taxonomy of teaching strategies used to create…