The authors describe activities designed to teach the concept of weight to five and six year old children, using the imaginary 'Measureland' and its brand-new ride 'The Zipline Balancer'. They explore how they addressed misconceptions and insights are provided into the evolving measurement understandings of young children.

The use of live animals in instruction plays an important role in biological education, with the intention that attitudes and emotions should be positively influenced. To date, studies in this field have given mixed results, and there has certainly been a lack of studies on student attitudes and knowledge of poisonous and venomous animals. This…

For many years, research has supported the value of using real-life experiences as teaching opportunities (Noobanjong & Louhapensang, 2017; Powell, 2015). This is just as true of teaching writing as of anything else. In fact, when learners use writing (such as journaling) to share their experiences, they benefit in several ways, including…

Unique approaches are important to explore for every aspect of our work with children, including therapeutic support for traumatized children. Sometimes, these techniques involve inviting some furry friends into the classroom.

In an introductory geology course on vertebrate fossils, a new object-based classroom exercise was designed to enhance students' appreciation for evidence of evolution as a "tinkering" process, specifically in modern organisms with which everyone is familiar. During the dissection of a popular college late-night snack (barbeque-style…

Research shows that students exposed to career and technical education are more likely to graduate from high school, attend college, and earn higher salaries than those who do not (Dougherty 2016). Job-shadowing experiences like those at the High School Zoo Academy in Omaha, Nebraska, can help adolescents identify their career goals and understand…

The aim of this study was to investigate the locomotor activity and anxiety changes in acute and chronic exposure to cigarette smoke in mice. In the chronic exposure group, mice were exposed to the smoke of 10 cigarettes for 5 days a week, over 5 consecutive weeks. In the acute group, the mice were exposed to the smoke of 10 cigarettes in one day.…

The evolutionarily conserved Elongator Complex associates with RNA polymerase II for transcriptional elongation. Elp3 is the catalytic subunit, contains histone acetyltransferase activity, and is associated with neurodegeneration in humans. Elp1 is a scaffolding subunit and when mutated causes familial dysautonomia. Here, we show that…

The formation of mate recognition memory in mice is associated with neural changes at the reciprocal dendrodendritic synapses between glutamatergic mitral cell (MC) projection neurons and GABAergic granule cell (GC) interneurons in the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB). Although noradrenaline (NA) plays a critical role in the formation of the memory,…

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropomorphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters, and…

When discrete localizable stimuli are used during appetitive Pavlovian conditioning, "sign-tracking" and "goal-tracking" responses emerge. Sign-tracking is observed when conditioned responding is directed toward the CS, whereas goal-tracking manifests as responding directed to the site of expected reward delivery. These…

All educators want their classrooms to be inviting areas that support investigations. However, a common mistake is to fill learning spaces with items or objects that are set up by the teacher or are simply "for show." This type of setting, although it may create a comfortable space for students, fails to stimulate investigations and…

The importance of plants is not as clearly understood as that of animals. This lack of attention is called "plant blindness" and is considered one of the most important problems in biology education. Textbooks do not put much emphasis on plants and, therefore, they may contribute to plant blindness. In this research, ten textbooks used…

We give an unconventional, mythopoetic response to the question of Why teach mathematics to all learners in school? In our work with pre-service teachers, we attempt to teach how to value the vulnerability of the multispecies world in a relational, anti-colonial way through passionate immersion, and to use mathematics education towards the ends of…

Active learning activities offer opportunities for medical students to facilitate the retention of knowledge and develop soft skills. We aimed to create a guide for an interdisciplinary mock trial learning activity within the medical curriculum of the College of Medicine, Anhembi Morumbi University--Laureate International Universities, Sao Paulo,…