Active learning provides students with meaningful and introspective roles in education. However, active learning is difficult to achieve in online class settings, particularly for biology laboratories initially designed to offer direct interactions with live organisms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a transition to online learning was required in…

This qualitative study compares the views about nature of science (NOS) between students enrolled in a traditional lecture and laboratory course and students in an inquiry-based class to the view of the scientists who taught the course. We administered the Views of Nature of Science Form C (VNOS-C) to identify students' views after partaking in…

After a grueling grading campaign, a chemist asked a writing and rhetoric specialist for help improving formal reports in the introductory organic chemistry lab. Together, we realized that the very best student reports employ many persuasive moves in the combined results and discussion subsection, whereas weaker papers omit the persuasive…

This paper describes an alternative approach to teaching and learning practices in an undergraduate physics laboratory. The instructor plans and implements the 5E instructional model into the laboratory instruction. The article includes an example of the 5E lesson for the laboratory component of a physics course, which has separate lecture and…

A physics laboratory instructor used action research to effectively implement a 5E instructional approach, which incorporated scientific practices. The instructor explored how to integrate the instructional approach into practice, challenges present in the implementation, and students' learning experiences. The data were collected during three…

This article showcases how a physics lab course was successfully redesigned to promote important reasoning abilities not explicitly addressed in the typical college setting. Student development of such abilities is essential for sound decision making, particularly when living in an information age. Essential features of our guiding curricular…

This article outlines a study that compared an online virtual laboratory with a face-to-face laboratory. The main objective of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a virtual method of instruction for a general studies, physical science laboratory course. Using a pretest-posttest only design with nonequivalent control groups, differences…

We describe how a practical instructional development process helped a first-year assistant professor rapidly develop, implement, and assess the impact on her Analytical Chemistry course caused by three changes: (a) moving the lab into the same semester as the lecture, (b) developing a more collaborative classroom environment, and (c) increasing…

Despite numerous calls for science education to be driven by authentic investigation, many laboratory experiences continue to consist of disconnected weekly units during which students carry out instructions that lead to some predetermined finding. This study developed and evaluated a pedagogical design for introductory biology labs where students…

An introductory undergraduate biology laboratory session about vertebrate tissues was gamified to elucidate the effects of gameful learning on students' perceptions of their own learning and motivation. Student groups were randomly assigned a vertebrate tissue, including corresponding slides and content from the laboratory manual, and tasked with…

The authors investigated the impact of changing student-TA relations to include a sense of mentoring by redesigning TA allocations so that students worked with the same TA throughout the semester, but without changing student-to-TA ratios.

This article presents the combination of three enhanced educational approaches for training future scientists. These methods incorporate skills generally not introduced in the freshman year: student-led blackboard introductions; the writing of scientific papers; and the design, execution, and presentation of an independent lab module. We tested…

Inquiry-based instruction is widely promoted to increase both students' conceptual understanding and their engagement in course content. What this means for day-to-day practices in the classroom is more elusive. Instructors adopting inquiry-based curricula often are unaware of the typical instructional challenges they may face. In particular,…

Over the past decade, several reports have recommended a shift in undergraduate biology laboratory courses from traditionally structured, often described as "cookbook," to authentic research-based experiences. This study compares a cookbook-type laboratory course to a research-based undergraduate biology laboratory course at a Research 1…

The Index of Learning Styles (ILS) generates reliable data. Its ability to characterize learning preference has been validated. However, the ILS has had very limited application in biology education. In 2009, students in an introductory biology laboratory completed the ILS. Overall academic performance (2009) was negatively associated with…