Western societal norms have long been constrained by binary and exclusionary perspectives on matters such as infertility, contraception, sexual health, sexuality, and gender. These viewpoints have shaped research and knowledge frameworks for decades and led to an inaccurate and incomplete reproductive biology curriculum. To combat these…

Many medical schools offer pre-professional programs to undergraduate students. The main purpose of the university pre-professional program (UPPP) is to equip students with the necessary knowledge and skills required to successfully cope with the academic demands of further education provided by professional colleges. The aim of this commentary…

Learning the first programming language is challenging for many students. High failure rates and bimodally distributed grades lead to a pedagogical interest in supporting students in first-year programming courses (CS1). In higher education, the important role of feedback for guiding the learning process and improving the learning outcome is…

Anatomy teaching is seeing a decline in both lecture and laboratory hours across many medical schools in North America. New strategies are therefore needed to not only make anatomy teaching more clinically integrated, but also to implement new interactive teaching techniques to help students more efficiently grasp the complex organization of the…

Students with high incidence disabilities (i.e., specific learning disabilities, emotional disturbance, intellectual disability, etc.) exhibit impairments in the areas of attention, memory, perception, processing linguistic information, and reasoning that affects their ability to learn. Hence, the ability to design and deliver explicit, enhanced…

We describe an intensive course that integrates graduate and continuing education focused on the development and scale-up of chromatography processes used for the recovery and purification of proteins with special emphasis on biotherapeutics. The course includes lectures, laboratories, teamwork, and a design exercise and offers a complete view of…

This article describes an effective approach to teaching chemistry by bringing the laboratory to the center of teaching, to bring the excitement of discovery to the learning process. The lectures and laboratories are closely integrated to provide a holistic learning experience. The laboratories progress from verification to open-inquiry and…

A new lecture/laboratory course to offer advanced biochemical training for undergraduate and early graduate students has been developed in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. This unique course offers students an opportunity to work hands-on with modern instrumentation not normally found in a predominately…

Emerging interest in genomics in the scientific community prompted biologists at James Madison University to create two courses at different levels to modernize the biology curriculum. The courses are hybrids of classroom and laboratory experiences. An upper level class uses raw sequence of a genome (plasmid or virus) as the subject on which to…

This paper presents a game of industrialisation, based on a paper airplane, that mimics real world production ramp-up and blends classical engineering courses together. It is based on a low cost product so that it can be mass produced. The game targets graduate students and practitioners in engineering fields. For students, it offers an experiment…

Technology advancement and human needs have led to integration among many engineering disciplines. Mechatronics engineering is an integrated discipline that focuses on the design and analysis of complete engineering systems. These systems include mechanical, electrical, computer and control subsystems. In this paper, the importance of teaching…

A new physical chemistry laboratory experience has been designed for upper-level undergraduate chemistry majors. Students customize the first 10 weeks of their laboratory experience by choosing their own set of experiments (from a manual of choices) and setting their own laboratory schedule. There are several topics presented in the accompanying…

Learning is best served when students are mentally and physically (actively participation) in the process. Most college and university instructors consist of lectures, discussions, instructional videos, computer simulations, online teaching, guest speakers, but also include active learning components of laboratories, greenhouses, and field trips.…

Too often, students enter our classrooms with insufficient knowledge of physical science. As a result, they have a difficult time understanding content in texts, lectures, and laboratory activities. This lack of background knowledge can have an impact on their ability to ask questions and wonder--both key components of inquiry. In this article,…

DNA microarray is an ordered grid containing known sequences of DNA, which represent many of the genes in a particular organism. Each DNA sequence is unique to a specific gene. This technology enables the researcher to screen many genes from cells or tissue grown in different conditions. We developed an undergraduate lecture and laboratory…