An important part of promoting scientific literacy is developing disciplinary literacy practices, such as obtaining information from text and sharing investigation results through talk and writing. To support students to develop disciplinary literacy practices in science, educators must provide opportunities for them to work with multiple…

Information literacy is an essential skill for biologists; however, most biology curricula do not intentionally integrate information literacy into classroom and laboratory exercises. There is evidence that developing information literacy skills in undergraduates improves their research skills, writing, and GPAs. Our objective was to integrate…

After the summer nesting period, broad winged hawks are known for migrating nearly 10,000 kilometers, (6,200 miles) each fall from their breeding grounds in North America to tropical biomes in South America, where they spend the winter. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has labeled broad-winged hawks as a species of "least…

Many university and high school introductory physics courses include a laboratory portion where students follow a manual to conduct "cookbook" experiments. Here, we present an authentic research project for introductory physics students that focuses on kinematics that can be done outside a formal laboratory space. This experiment can be…

In this article we discuss, as a proof of concept, how a network model can be used to analyse gaze tracking data coming from a preliminary experiment carried out in a biodiversity education research project. We discuss the network model, a simple directed graph, used to represent the gaze tracking data in a way that is meaningful for the study of…

Biodiversity education is widely considered a necessary component of protecting global biodiversity by helping to change harmful attitudes and actions. BioBlitz events, rapid surveys of all living things in a defined area over a set period, are becoming a widely used practice for biodiversity education. The aim of this study was to evaluate the…

Evolutionary anthropologists commonly describe humans as a highly cooperative species, based on our evolved socio-cognitive capacities. However, students and the general public may not necessarily share this view about our species. At the same time, fostering our ability to cooperate is considered a key foundation for achieving sustainable…

This study aimed to develop secondary school seventh-grade students' awareness of natural habitats and the interactions among living things, as well as reveal their views on the problems encountered. The study was designed as a case study, a qualitative perspective and conducted with 64 students from a private school during the 2017-2018 academic…

We present a practical field exercise for ecology and animal behavior classes that can be carried out on campus, using urban wildlife. Students document an animal's feeding behavior to study its interactions with the surrounding environment. In this approach, an animal's feeding behavior is quantified at experimental food patches placed within its…

Although the practice of giving examples is central to the effective teaching and learning of science, it has been the object of little educational research. The present study attends to this issue by systematically examining the exemplification practices of a university professor and his students' learning experiences during a biology lecture on…

This dissertation explored the roles schools can play in the successful outcomes of large carnivore or keystone reintroduction projects. Schools are more than centers for knowledge acquisition--they connect their community and disseminate information quickly to a wide audience. This study took place in California's Eastern Sierra Nevada, a…

Experiential learning is essential in medical and veterinary student education and can improve students' communication with clients during medical appointments. There is limited research in veterinary education investigating the effectiveness of experiential learning environments to provide an "integrative approach" to teaching. The…

In all human cultures, people gesture iconically. However, the evolutionary basis of iconic gestures is unknown. In this study, chimpanzees and bonobos, and 2- and 3-year-old children, learned how to operate two apparatuses to get rewards. Then, at test, only a human adult had access to the apparatuses, and participants could instruct her about…

One of the innovations in the Slovenian school system has been the introduction of elective subjects in the curricula of primary and secondary schools, thus there is a lack of teaching manuals for practical exercises and hands-on classroom experience. This situation is reflected in the Ethology classroom and for that purpose we prepared…

This case study examined a team of instructors' use of social presence, teaching presence, and attitudinal dissonance in a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on Animal Behaviour and Welfare (ABW), designed to facilitate attitudinal learning. The study reviewed a team of six instructors' use of social presence and teaching presence by applying the…