In this paper, the authors describe how two institutions are helping their undergraduate biology students build quantitative competencies. Incorporation of quantitative skills and reasoning in biology are framed through a discussion of two cases that both concern introductory biology courses, but differ in the complexity of the mathematics and the…

The main purpose of this qualitative research was to discover the effects of problem-based learning on a fifth grade language arts classroom. The secondary purpose was to examine how receptive fifth grade students were to a new way of learning. In this descriptive study, a group of nine students created an alternate reality game as part of a…

This study examined the effectiveness of a new learning approach in teaching classification of invertebrate animals in biology courses. In this approach, we used an impersonal style: the subject jigsaw, which differs from the other jigsaws in that both course topics and student groups are divided. Students in Jigsaw group were divided into five…

The objective of this study was to provide the person in charge and food safety instructors an assessment tool to help characterize, identify strengths and weaknesses, determine the completeness of the knowledge gained by the employee, and evaluate the level of content presentation and usability of current retail food safety training platforms. An…

Most undergraduate chemistry courses and a few high school honors courses, which focus on physical chemistry and quantum mechanics, are highly mathematically-oriented. At the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, we developed a new module for high school students, titled "Chemistry--From 'the Hole' to 'the Whole': From the Nanoscale to…

A combination of regular classroom teaching with the use of resources available on the Moodle platform has been designed to foster the development of skills for learning to learn for students in an undergraduate general chemistry course. The use of the Moodle platform essentially aimed at strengthening the students' prior knowledge of…

We investigated how students articulate uncertainty when they are engaged in structured scientific argumentation tasks where they generate, examine, and interpret data to determine the existence of exoplanets. In this study, 302 high school students completed 4 structured scientific arguments that followed a series of computer-model-based…

Migrant and seasonal farmworkers are typically Spanish-speaking, Latino immigrants with limited formal education and low literacy skills and, as such, are a vulnerable population. We describe the development of the "Pesticides and Farmworker Health Toolkit", a pesticide safety and health curriculum designed to communicate to farmworkers…

High school students have had some difficulties in understanding chemistry due to traditional ways of teaching this specific science. It is important to improve teaching methods that increase student motivation, not only to enhance their capacity for understanding, but also to generate a greater level of interest in the study of chemistry for…

This study explores the adoption of the team-based learning (TBL) method in knowledge-based and theory-oriented journalism and mass communication (J&MC) courses. It first reviews the origin and concept of TBL, the relevant theories, and then introduces the TBL method and implementation, including procedures and assessments, employed in an…

This dissertation describes a novel intelligent tutoring system, BeSocratic, which aims to help fill the gap between simple multiple-choice systems and free-response systems. BeSocratic focuses on targeting questions that are free-form in nature yet defined to the point which allows for automatic evaluation and analysis. The system includes a set…

This instructional module, which is used in a principal certification graduate class entitled School and Community Relations, is fixed within the literature that describes school stakeholders' confusion about the explicit roles of school counselors, especially principals. The authors begin by creating a framework for the lesson activity in which…

Technology facilitated teaching and learning can now influence the way both lecturers and students collaborate. The problem is that many of these interventions are conducted in a non-systematic ad-hoc way. There are concerns that merely adopting a traditional lecturing approach to a technology based environment provides little if any advantage to…

Within recent years, there is an increasing need to train students, from biology and beyond, in quantitative methods that are relevant to cope with data-driven biology. Systems Biology is such a field that places a particular focus on the functional aspect of biology and molecular interacting processes. This paper deals with the conceptual design…

In 2008, Macquarie University instituted the Participation and Community Engagement (PACE) initiative. This initiative embeds units in the curriculum that involve learning through participation (LTP) that is mutually beneficial to the student, the University and the organisation or community in which student participation activities take place.…