We describe a third-year undergraduate course that focuses on multiscale modeling and protein folding and has as its primary goal the encouragement of students to integrate thinking across and beyond disciplinary boundaries. The ability to perform innovative and successful research work in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…

The engineering profession continues to struggle to attract new talent, in part because it is not well understood by the general public and often viewed in a negative light. Therefore, engineering professionals have called for new approaches promote better understanding and change negative perceptions. One suggested approach is for engineering…

Today, science teachers continue to seek ways to improve their instruction and become credentialed as "highly qualified" in their field. This paper describes how science and science education faculty at the University of Massachusetts and veteran K-12 science teachers, with funding from the National Science Foundation, designed Science…

We present the most recent steps undertaken to reform the introductory algebra-based course at The George Washington University. The reform sought to help students improve their problem-solving performance. Our pedagogy relies on didactic constructs such as the" GW-ACCESS problem-solving protocol," "instructional sequences" and…

As advocated by the new K-12 framework for science and as demonstrated in research, teachers are making use of media, now more than ever, to capture students' attention and draw connections between school science and students' everyday lives (Klosterman, Sadler, and Brown 2012; NRC 2012). However, it is essential for students to understand the…

A collaborative of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and education faculty developed a STEM certificate aimed at elementary education majors. A four-phase process model was used to create and evaluate courses. The certificate is comprised of three interdisciplinary, team-taught, lab-based courses: Environmental Biology,…

A complete course of respiratory physiology suitable for first-year medical and graduate students has been placed on the Web for our own students and for other educational institutions. There are several reasons for doing this. The first is that the modern-day student uses a variety of options for acquiring knowledge. These include attending…

This paper describes the redesign and implementation of the course, "Introduction to Programming for Engineers" using microcontroller (MCU) hardware as the programming target. The objective of this effort is to improve the programming competency for engineering students by more closely relating the initial programming experience to the student's…

Students in information technology (IT) need realistic, hands-on experience to master IT skills. When students have the opportunity to train with a hands-on curriculum and prepare to certify in the IT field, they become more deeply engaged in both their education and their career path. This article discusses LabSim, an IT certification training…

A summer academy is held for grade 9-12 high school students at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, every year. The academy, dubbed the Da Vinci Engineering Enrichment Program (DEEP), is a diverse program that aims to attract domestic and international high school students to engineering and sciences (and possibly recruit them). DEEP…

We transformed our first-year curriculum in biology with a new course, Biological Inquiry, in which greater than 50% of all incoming, first-year students enroll. The course replaced a traditional, content-driven course that relied on outdated approaches to teaching and learning. We diversified pedagogical practices by adopting guided inquiry in…

We describe a 10-week laboratory course of guided research experiments thematically linked by topic, which had an ultimate goal of strengthening the undergraduate research-teaching nexus. This undergraduate laboratory course is a direct extension of faculty research interests. From DNA isolation, characterization, and mutagenesis, to protein…

Although undergraduates have long held a role as teaching assistants for introductory science courses at liberal arts colleges and universities, educational institutions often do not provide these students with opportunities to explore science teaching and pedagogy. At Brandeis University, we designed an internship course to help increase the…

Statistics is used in almost every facet of our daily lives: crime reports, election results, environmental/climate change, advances in business, financial planning, and progress in multifarious research. Although understanding statistics is essential for efficient functioning in the modern world (Cerrito 1996), students often do not grasp…

Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI) is an instructional model that enables science teachers to transform a traditional laboratory activity into a short integrated instructional unit. To illustrate how the ADI instructional model works, this article describes an ADI lesson developed for a 10th-grade chemistry class. This example lesson was designed to…