Traditional laboratory courses involve students following detailed weekly experimental procedures, culminating in either a laboratory report or handout at the end of each experiment. While this setup teaches basic laboratory skills, it usually does not encourage students to think critically or independently. Therefore, many laboratory instructors…

The focus of this article is on the evaluation and outcomes of a professional learning opportunity that focused on 13 current K-12 public school science educators in the United States. This teacher training concentrated on sustainability education that utilized marine sciences as a unifying concept. Findings from this training helped to identify…

Framed by a social practice perspective, this article presents a theoretical, political, and practical rationale for implementing and expanding water, sanitation and hygiene education (WASH) in preschools throughout the world. Every day thousands of young children die, while others suffer serious illness or stunting from water-, sanitation-, and…

The use of informal science education in rural areas, especially at rural middle schools has not been well documented. Although rural areas have accessible outdoor learning environments compared to urban areas, teachers are less likely to incorporate informal science activities. The purpose of this study was to evaluate two seventh grade life…

Water-resource scientists have become increasingly concerned about global water quality and quantity issues. Water and watershed education are now mandated topics for school-aged youth. Pennsylvania teachers lack consistent and accessible curricula to teach students about water quality and quantity. A mail survey administered in 2004 determined…

Drawing on game-design principles and an underlying situated theoretical perspective, we developed and researched a 3D game-based curriculum designed to teach water quality concepts. We compared undergraduate student dyads assigned randomly to four different instructional design conditions where the content had increasingly level of…

Background: Most policy doctrines promote the use of scientific inquiry in the K-12 classroom, but good inquiry is hard to implement, particularly for schools with fiscal and safety constraints and for teachers struggling with understanding how to do so. Purpose: In this paper, we present the design of a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE)…