This study focuses on examining the mental models of 11th and 12th-grade students attending a science high school in Turkey regarding the concept of the electron cloud. The study involved 72 students and employed the case study method. The precondition for selecting the sample was that the students had covered the unit on modern atomic theory in…

Student success is often treated as an observed variable, or something that you can measure directly with a single instrument. Single course outcomes such as final course grade or learning gain on an assessment have become synonymous with success in undergraduate science education research. Continually relying on these narrow course outcomes to…

The development of science writing and presentation skills is necessary for a successful science career. Too often these skills are not included in pre- or postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, leading to a disconnect between high schoolers' expectations for college preparedness and the skills needed to…

The coronavirus pandemic of 2019 transformed the way that educators, across all levels and disciplines, seek to establish and provide a pedagogically sound curriculum. With the continued need to transform curriculum into an online format, secondary-level animal science instructors have several points to consider if their applied discipline will…

The field of astrobiology is concerned with the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the Universe. It contains within it civilization-level questions such as: What is the future of humanity on Earth and can we successfully explore and settle other planets? As such, it offers an educational framework for both teaching basic science and…

The aims of teaching laboratories is an important and ever-evolving topic of discussion amongst teaching staff at teaching institutions. It is often assumed that both teaching staff and students are implicitly aware of these aims, although this is rarely tested or measured. This assumption can lead to mismatched beliefs between students and…

With rapid advances in the biosciences, bioethics has become an important, if not vital part of a comprehensive bioscience education. Students who successfully complete a course in bioethics will be better equipped for writing manuscripts for publication, preparing research proposals for funding bodies and completing applications for research…

Students who engage in undergraduate research experiences acquire many benefits, including an understanding of how scientific knowledge is constructed, recognition that knowledge can be complex and uncertain, and the habit of viewing knowledge critically. This paper describes a first-year two-course sequence that provides multidisciplinary…

This article describes a general education course offering, Physics and the Arts. During the development of this course, physics and arts faculty collaborated closely. We cover the usual physics phenomena for such a course--light, color, and sound--in addition to gravity, equilibrium, and spacetime. Goals of the course are to increase students'…

Outreach efforts directed toward improving STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) literacy are vitally important to ensure that all of our citizens are prepared to fully participate in an increasingly complex and technology-driven world. Attempts to maximize the effectiveness of STEM outreach has focused on younger populations,…

The partnership between science and the environment in service-learning projects helps students to make greater connections to the world around them. Service learning provides many benefits to students, faculty, and communities within the context of a college course. However, to prevent frustration, it is important for faculty members to make a…

Graduate attributes and course learning outcomes are an integral part of higher education in Australia. Testing the performance of graduates in the workplace with regard to graduate attributes and course learning outcomes is a not a common occurrence. This study has road tested the graduate attributes and course learning outcomes of a bachelor…

The cloud has become a widely used term in academia and the industry. Education has not remained unaware of this trend, and several educational solutions based on cloud technologies are already in place, especially for software as a service cloud. However, an evaluation of the educational potential of infrastructure and platform clouds has not…

Undergraduate and graduate engineering training differ significantly. The former looks to established protocols and formulas to design and control processes while the latter often involves questioning established protocols and formulas to better suit and describe phenomena. Although we do not dispute the benefits of practical hands-on approaches,…

The purpose of this study was to understand one case of undergraduate inquiry-based instruction through the words and actions of students and instructors. The data sources included fieldnotes from 16 of 29 classes, two sets of student and instructor interviews (beginning and end of the semester), and a collection of artifacts, such as the…