The design and implementation of an advanced guided-inquiry experiment for the organic laboratory is described. Grubbs's second-generation catalyst is used to effect the ring-closing metathesis of diethyl diallylmalonate. The reaction is carried out under an inert atmosphere at room temperature and monitored by argentic TLC. The crude reaction is…

The study reports empirical tests of Anderson's, Haubensak's, Helson's, and Parducci's rating models when two end anchors are used for rating. The results show that these models cannot predict the judgment effect called here the Dai Pra effect. It is shown that an extension of Anderson's model is consistent with this effect. The results confirm…

A broad continuum exists to describe the structure of inquiry lessons (Hanegan, Friden, & Nelson, 2009). Most teachers have heard inquiry described from a range of simple questioning to completely student-designed scientific studies (Chinn & Malhotra, 2002). Biotechnology education often uses a variety of inquiries from cookbook laboratory…

Adding Mentos to an open bottle of Diet Coke can produce a fountain of liquid and froth extending several metres high. This activity can engage a wide audience of learners in a relevant and meaningful way, provide a model for creative science teaching, and help to develop learners' attitudes towards school science as a subject. In this paper, the…

To examine the processes that support prospective remembering, previous research has often examined whether the presence of a prospective memory task slows overall responding on an ongoing task. Although slowed task performance suggests that monitoring is present, this method does not clearly establish whether monitoring is functionally related to…

Although people often have to learn from environments with scarce and highly selective outcome feedback, the question of how nonfeedback trials are represented in memory and affect later performance has received little attention in models of learning and decision making. In this article, the authors use the generalized context model (Nosofsky,…

A common moving-coil (dynamic) loudspeaker is a device very suitable for teaching the general features of oscillating systems. As an addition to a previous paper (Kraftmakher 2009), this paper includes the following topics: (i) a new design of the optical sensor for measuring the cone oscillations; (ii) positive feedback and self-excited…

Is object-based attention mandatory or under strategic control? In an adapted spatial cuing paradigm, participants focused initially on a central arrow cue that was part of a perceptual group (Experiment 1) or a uniformly connected object (Experiment 2), encompassing one of the potential target locations. The cue always pointed to an opposite,…

The conditions for serial search are described. A multiple target search methodology (Thornton & Gilden, 2007) is used to home in on the simplest target/distractor contrast that effectively mandates a serial scheduling of attentional resources. It is found that serial search is required when (a) targets and distractors are mirror twins, and…

The experimental examination applied in the 40th International Physics Olympiad held in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, is presented. The examination consisted of two parts: (1) based on the measurements of a diffraction pattern produced by a diode laser impinging on a sharp edge of a razor blade, the students were asked to estimate the wavelength of the…

We describe here two open-ended laboratory investigations for an undergraduate laboratory course that uses students' DNA as templates for quantitative real-time PCR and for traditional PCR followed by RFLP analysis. Students are captivated by the immediacy of the application and the relevance of the genotypes and traits, lactase persistence or…

We report on the physics around an incandescent lamp. Using a consumer-grade digital camera, we combine electrical and optical measurements to explore Planck's law of black-body radiation. This simple teaching experiment is successfully used to measure both Stefan's and Planck's constants. Our measurements lead to a strikingly accurate value for…

In the context of a teaching experiment in elementary group theory, interesting difficulties arose as undergraduate students struggled to make sense of the meaning of the associative property as they reinvented the group concept. A subsequent exploration of the research literature revealed similar difficulties have been observed in research with…

Experience-dependent enhancement of neural encoding of pitch in the auditory brainstem has been observed for only specific portions of native pitch contours exhibiting high rates of pitch acceleration, irrespective of speech or nonspeech contexts. This experiment allows us to determine whether this language-dependent advantage transfers to…

Human infants develop a variety of attentional mechanisms that allow them to extract relevant information from a cluttered multimodal world. We know that both social and nonsocial cues shift infants' attention, but not how these cues differentially affect learning of multimodal events. Experiment 1 used social cues to direct 8- and 4-month-olds'…