As biologists accumulate or encounter increasingly large and complex data sets, our field creates the need for students to develop skills in data exploration and visualization. Many biology courses lack the time for students to develop the skills needed to parse complex datasets and visualize them appropriately. We developed a new upper-level…

Plagiarism is regarded as the act of "taking credit for or benefitting from somebody else's ideas, words, concepts, formulations, etc. without giving due credit by means of referencing or quoting, and presenting work for personal benefit which does not contain individual authorship (Brown University Writing Centre 2015). In this paper, I will…

Plagiarism is regarded as the act of "taking credit for or benefitting from somebody else's ideas, words, concepts, formulations, etc. without giving due credit by means of referencing or quoting, and presenting work for personal benefit which does not contain individual authorship" (Brown University Writing Centre 2015). In this paper,…

The purpose of this article is to present a few of the innovative techniques used in the execution of Morgan Chivers' sculptural work, not on the content of the work itself. The author's interest has been in merging the methodologies and precise output control of 3D printing with finished objects in nonprintable materials as required by the…

In online educational systems we can easily collect and analyze extensive data about student learning. Current practice, however, focuses only on some aspects of these data, particularly on correctness of students answers. When a student answers incorrectly, the submitted wrong answer can give us valuable information. We provide an overview of…

Gary S. Stager is the coauthor of "Invent To Learn--Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom," founder of "Constructing Modern Knowledge," special assistant to the head of school for innovation at the Willows Community School (California), and a teacher educator. In this article he begins by describing and debunking…

This paper describes the structure of the "Air Pollution Course", an environmental science laboratory course developed at the Science Education Laboratory of the Faculty of Primary Education, University of Athens, as well as the findings resulting from its implementation by pre-service elementary teachers. The course proposed in this…

This article describes a method of instruction using an active learning strategy for teaching stoichiometry through a process of gradual knowledge building. Students identify their misconceptions and progress through a sequence of questions based on the same chemical equation. An infrared device and software registered as the TurningPoint Audience…

Statistical studies are referenced in the news every day, so frequently that people are sometimes skeptical of reported results. Often, no matter how large a sample size researchers use in their studies, people believe that the sample size is too small to make broad generalizations. The tasks presented in this article use simulations of repeated…

Concept inventories, consisting of multiple-choice questions designed around common student misconceptions, are designed to reveal student thinking. However, students often have complex, heterogeneous ideas about scientific concepts. Constructed-response assessments, in which students must create their own answer, may better reveal students'…

In this article, the authors explore framing, a non-multiplicative technique commonly employed by students as they construct similar shapes. When students frame, they add (or subtract) a "border" of fixed width about a geometric object. Although the approach does not yield similar shapes in general, the mathematical underpinnings of…

The concept of "function" spans elementary school through high school. When introducing the topic to elementary school and middle school students, the authors ask them to work with a variety of examples and representations of functions, since a formal definition of a function is rather abstract. They give the most accessible geometric functions…

Information spreads online at a much faster rate than ever before, often without being confirmed by trustworthy sources. Students must be able to evaluate the online source and the online source's information for accuracy and credibility. In public speaking, argumentation, and persuasion classes (among others), students are taught to use confirmed…

The periodic table and the periodic system are central to chemistry and thus to many introductory chemistry courses. A number of existing activities use various data sets to model the development process for the periodic table. This paper describes an image arrangement computer program developed to mimic a paper-based card sorting periodic table…

Computer-based testing--is an effective teacher's tool, intended to optimize course goals and assessment techniques in a comparatively short time. However, this is accomplished only if we deal with high-quality tests. It is strange, but despite the 100-year history of Testing Theory (see, Anastasi, A., Urbina, S. (1997). Psychological testing.…