Development of learning progressions has been at the forefront of science education for several years. While understanding students' conceptual development toward "big ideas" in science is extremely valuable for researchers, science teachers can also benefit from assessment tools that diagnose their students' trajectories along the learning…

Primary research articles discuss aspects of scientific inquiry that are important in understanding the nature of science. Yet, most introductory science courses use textbooks that ignore the scientific process; opportunities for explicit discussion of the nature of science are lost. In Hampshire College's science program, students read current…

When evaluating equity, researchers often look at the "achievement gap." Privileging knowledge and skills as primary outcomes of science education misses other, more subtle, but critical, outcomes indexing inequitable science education. In this comparative ethnography, we examined what it meant to "be scientific" in two fourth-grade classes taught…

This article is a contribution to the search for evidence-based models of learning to improve science education. The author believes that modern teachers should look to the sciences of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to build a science of science teaching. Understanding the relationships between learning and the brain's structure and…

The "explicit-reflective-embedded" approach is an effective way of teaching nature of science (NOS). But, the studies have not provided a clear or explicit definition of the approach in terms of an instructional design framework. The approach has two sides including embedding into content knowledge and purposively teaching the NOS aspects as a…

Classroom activities that include the process of model building, in which students build simplified physical representations of a system, have the potential to help students make meaningful connections between physics and the real world. We describe a lesson designed with this intent for an introductory college classroom that engages students in…

In this article, we describe a simple method which can be used to measure the efficiency of a low power dc motor, a motor-converted dynamo and a coupled motor-dynamo module as a function of the speed of rotation. The result can also be used to verify Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction. (Contains 1 table and 8 figures.)

The periodic table and the periodic system are central to chemistry and thus to many introductory chemistry courses. A number of existing activities use various data sets to model the development process for the periodic table. This paper describes an image arrangement computer program developed to mimic a paper-based card sorting periodic table…

Several case studies from popular television medical dramas are described for use in an undergraduate biochemistry course. These cases, which illustrate fundamental principles of biochemistry, are used as the basis for problems that can be discussed further in small groups. Medical cases provide an interesting context for biochemistry with video…

Science is a dynamic discipline, representative of the nature of science. Yet, young science students continue to think everything is already discovered. In this study, we examine why students are not actively doing science. From professional development to student engagement, how are classrooms and students changing as we increase teachers'…

Societal benefit depends on the general public's understandings of biotechnology (Betsch in "World J Microbiol Biotechnol" 12:439-443, 1996; Dawson and Cowan in "Int J Sci Educ" 25(1):57-69, 2003; Schiller in "Business Review: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia" (Fourth Quarter), 2002; Smith and Emmeluth in "Am Biol Teach" 64(2):93-99, 2002). A…

Evidence exists that children's understanding can be facilitated through collaborative group work with peers, but little is known about the underlying processes. When processes are discussed, they are typically assumed to involve the assimilation of superior ideas that are constructed jointly. However, the assimilation of joint constructions…

The cooling of objects is often described by a law, attributed to Newton, which states that the temperature difference of a cooling body with respect to the surroundings decreases exponentially with time. Such behaviour has been observed for many laboratory experiments, which led to a wide acceptance of this approach. However, the heat transfer…

When data with and without an optically active sample are acquired simultaneously while one manually rotates the analyser, the graph of the first signal versus the second one is an ellipse whose shape shows the phase shift between the two signals; this shift is twice the optical rotation. There is no need to measure the rotation of the analyser or…

A common example of real-world motion that can be modeled by a differential equation, and one easily understood by the student, is the simple pendulum. Simplifying assumptions are necessary for closed-form solutions to exist, and frequently there is little discussion of the impact if those assumptions are not met. This article presents a…