Community colleges, including those in Virginia, continue to increase online course offerings in an effort to provide access and cost effective education to a growing student population. With increased student demand for online learning, community colleges should explore further the possibility of offering more science courses online. This…

The importance of biodiversity to the health of our planet is increasingly being discussed, not only by scientists, but by the public at large. Therefore, an understanding of how human activities are affecting biodiversity is vital for informed participation in society, and thus it is an important topic for liberal arts education. Here, I present…

With the goal of increasing the immediacy of the relationship between tenure-track professors and students, science departments in liberal arts colleges may try to arrange their curriculum so that students have the same professor in both the lecture and the lab section of introductory courses. While this goal seems laudable, empirical data are…

Evolutionary theory is central to the biological sciences, and to critical aspects of everyday life, and yet a significant proportion of Americans reject evolution. Our study sets out to examine the role of a second year college general education course in affecting students' acceptance of evolution. We report three years of data using the Measure…

Community colleges continue to increase online course offerings as these institutions strive to offer open access, cost effective education to a growing student population. With an increased student demand for online learning, community colleges should explore the possibility of offering all courses in the online environment, including science…

This article introduces a new course in the Virginia Community College System English Curriculum, "English 114: Scientific Writing." The article briefly reviews the concept of "science rhetoric," then discusses the intended audience and purpose of the course, and explains the basic goals of the course in relation to the…

We present a measure, which we have named the Pedagogical Expectancy Violation Assessment (PEVA), for instructors to gauge one aspect of the success of their implementation of pedagogical reform by assessing the expectations and experiences of the students in the classroom. We implemented the PEVA in four physics classes at three institutions that…

This study examined the effect of using blogs as reflective journals during a methods course and practicum period on preservice science teacher reflections. The researchers investigated blogging and commenting as potential catalysts for critical reflection using an action research approach. The participants were 10 graduate preservice secondary…

A new laboratory course has been developed at the University of Virginia for senior- level chemical engineering students. The new course is based on three 4-week long experiments in bioprocess engineering, energy conversion and catalysis, and polymer synthesis and characterization. The emphasis is on the integration of process steps and the…

Inverness Research studied the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Seminars on Science program for eight years, from its inception in 1998 to 2006. This paper presents teacher survey ratings for "The Ocean System", along with profiles of three teachers who took the course. Course takers report on the annual follow-up surveys that…

Inverness Research studied the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Seminars on Science program for eight years, from its inception in 1998 to 2006. In 2008, Inverness Research conducted additional studies of the AMNH's new online course, "Evolution". This paper presents teacher survey ratings for "Evolution", along with…

Conceptual physics (CP) is an introductory survey course in which basic concepts are emphasized instead of formula-driven problem solving. Mathematical derivation is replaced by verbal explanation, pictorial representation, observations of phenomena, and logical reasoning. Algebraic equations are used as guides to thinking rather than recipes for…

Variation and polymorphism are concepts that are central to genetics and genomics, primary biological disciplines in which high school students and undergraduates require a solid foundation. From 1998 through 2002, a web-based genetics education program was developed for high school teachers and students. The program included an exercise on using…