Background: One of the unfortunate side effects of the industrial revolution has been the constant assault of the environment with various forms of pollution. Lately, this issue has taken a more critical dimension as prospects of global climate change and irreversible ecosystem damage are becoming a reality. Purpose: College graduates (especially…

Primary literature is our main mode of communication in the sciences. As such, it is important for our undergraduates in the discipline to learn how to read primary literature. Incorporating primary literature into undergraduate science courses is often difficult because students are unprepared to comprehend primary articles. Learning to read and…

Practical skills and competencies are critical to student engagement and effective learning in laboratory courses. This article describes the design of a yearlong, stand-alone laboratory course--the Biotechniques Laboratory--a common core course in the second year of all our degree programs in the biological sciences. It is an enabling,…

Two experiments using the science topics of Magnetism and Light were conducted with younger learners (Year 5) who had no prior knowledge of the topics, and older learners (Year 6) who had studied the topics previously. Half of the learners were presented the information in auditory form only while the other half were presented the auditory…

The speed of sound is a physical property that can be measured easily in the lab. However, finding an inexpensive and intuitive way for students to determine this speed has been more involved. The introduction of affordable consumer-grade high-speed cameras (such as the Exilim EX-FC100) makes conceptually simple experiments feasible. Since the…

The purpose of this study was to establish what impact experimental work has on the understanding of scientific concepts, what pupils remember about the experiments they carried out and how they are able to formulate and understand the experiment plan. A sample of 386 pupils aged 13+ participated in the research, of which 162 in the experimental…

Drawing from theory and research on perceived stigma (Pryor, Reeder, Yeadon, & Hesson-McInnis, 2004), attentional processes (Rinck & Becker, 2006), working memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974), and regulatory resources (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000), the authors examined discrimination against facially stigmatized applicants and the processes involved.…

This study examined the impact of collaborative filtering (the so-called recommender) on college students' use of an online forum for English learning. The forum was created with an open-source software, Drupal, and its extended recommender module. This study was guided by three main questions: 1) Is there any difference in online behaviors…

The construction of the European Higher Education Area has been an adaptation challenge for Spanish universities. New methodologies require a more active role on the students' part and come into conflict with the previous educational model characterised by a high student/professor ratio, a lecture-based teaching methodology and a summative…

A lithography lab course has been developed that is applicable to students from the middle-school level up to college students. It can also be inserted into electronics technology or similar courses in two- and four-year colleges, or used to demonstrate applications of polymers in chemistry classes. Some of these techniques would enable research…

Conventional corrective feedback has been widely practiced but has been said to be tedious, stressful and time consuming. As such, the focus of this study is to investigate the use of an alternative method to giving corrective feedback namely, an online corrective feedback through e-mail. In order to examine if this innovative form of corrective…

We present a method for assessing science inquiry performance, specifically for the inquiry skill of designing and conducting experiments, using educational data mining on students' log data from online microworlds in the Inq-ITS system (Inquiry Intelligent Tutoring System; www.inq-its.org). In our approach, we use a 2-step process: First we use…

In June 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that video games enjoy full free speech protections and that the regulation of violent game sales to minors is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court also referred to psychological research on violent video games as "unpersuasive" and noted that such research contains many methodological flaws.…

Educators have indicated that creative teaching is the most important educational activity; nevertheless, most existing education systems fail to engage students in effective creative tasks. To address this issue, this study proposes a mind map based collaborative learning approach for supporting creative learning activities and enhancing…

Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic rise in online delivery of higher education in the United States. Recent developments in web technology and access to the internet have led to a vast increase in online courses. For people who work during the day and whose complicated lives prevent them from taking courses on campus, online courses…