Experimental skills should be acquired by learners at school and university alike. To promote experimental skills, various approaches exist within a spectrum between implicit and explicit instruction. Regarding these instructional approaches, numerous findings are available which predominantly relate to pupils. It is an open question whether it is…

Energy is one of the most complex yet central concepts taught in schools and is featured in the Australian Science Curriculum, as one of the six key organising ideas (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2015). The literature portrays a multitude of complications associated with teaching energy (see Millar, 2005 for a…

Multiple pedagogical approaches, such as experimental experiences or computer-based activities, have been shown to increase student learning and engagement. We have developed a laboratory module that includes both a traditional "live" experimental component and a student-designed "virtual" computer simulation component. This…

The Advanced Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory (AIRLab) is a team-based multidisciplinary research course that focuses on the development of advanced skills including critical thinking, limits of knowledge awareness, metacognition, autonomy, professional capacity, and decision making in complex environments. For many students, AIRLab…

How can we help students develop an understanding of chemistry that integrates conceptual knowledge with the experimental and computational procedures needed to apply chemistry in authentic contexts? The current work describes ChemVLab +, a set of online chemistry activities that were developed using promising design principles from chemistry…

This research identifies a problem of practice with standardized science test scores declining over the last eight years. The Sea Turtle Elementary School for the Creative Arts (STESCA; pseudonym) schedule allowed 150 minutes per week for science instruction, compared with 450 minutes per week for mathematics instruction. Science instruction has…

Many studies illustrate the positive influences of undergraduate research experiences on student learning, attitudes, and retention in the sciences. At our institution, over 90% of the biology majors surveyed reported a desire to participate in undergraduate research, but only 3% per year have the opportunity to work in a traditional…

This study featured findings from a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research project at a STEM focused college. 'Project Synapse' was developed to build relevance between disciplines through authentic collaborations between biology and chemistry content. Integrated science practices were explicitly addressed during…

The use of external representations (ERs) to introduce concepts in undergraduate biology has become increasingly common. Two of the most prevalent are static images and dynamic animations. While previous studies comparing static images and dynamic animations have resulted in somewhat conflicting findings in regards to learning outcomes, the…

A chemistry laboratory experiment using everyday items and readily available chemicals is described to introduce advanced high school students and undergraduate college students to porous polymer membranes. In a three-step manufacturing process, a membrane is produced at room temperature. The filtration principle of the membrane is then…

A laboratory experiment in which students study the kinetics of the Viscozyme-L-catalyzed hydrolysis of cellulose and starch comparatively was designed for an upper-division biochemistry laboratory. The main objective of this experiment was to provide an opportunity to perform enhanced enzyme kinetics data analysis using appropriate informatics…

Proteins are involved in nearly every biological process, which makes them of interest to a range of scientists. Previous work has shown that hand-held cameras can be used to determine the concentration of colored analytes in solution, and this paper extends the approach to reactions involving a color change in order to quantify protein…

All the cells of higher organisms have the same DNA but not the same proteins. Each type of specialised cell that forms a tissue has its own pattern of gene expression and, consequently, it contains a particular set of proteins that determine its function. Here, we describe a laboratory exercise addressed to undergraduate students that aims to…

The purpose of this laboratory experiment is to study fundamental concepts of kinetics and equilibria and the isotope effects associated with both of these concepts. The concepts of isotopes in introductory and general chemistry courses are typically used within the contexts of atomic weights and radioactivity. Kinetic and equilibrium isotope…

We describe the design and implementation of an undergraduate peer mentor program that can overlay an existing general chemistry laboratory and is designed to improve STEM student retention. For the first four freshman cohorts going through the program, year-to-year retention improved by a four-year average of 20% for students in peer-mentored…