This work tested the hypothesis that the academic performance of students in a distance learning course in Biological Sciences (PBS-CEDERJ) decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic in disciplines with and without practical activities. Performance was quantified via students' grades in PBS-CEDERJ disciplines in pre-pandemic years (2018 and 2019) and…

The great development of high-throughput molecular biology techniques and the consequent generation of massive data have made Bioinformatics essential for undergraduate Bioscience students. The importance of this scientific discipline is evidenced by the huge number of specialized publications, tools, and databases available. Training in…

This paper analyzes the relationship between the development of pedagogical innovation projects in experimental sciences and the establishment and evolution of Professional Learning Communities (PLC) in higher education, within an open innovation framework. To achieve this, an evaluative study employing a mixed-methods approach was conducted,…

Research from other STEM disciplines suggests that a systems thinking approach can motivate students to learn content meaningfully and in a way that empowers them to use their knowledge to benefit the world around them. However, systems thinking is not currently widespread in chemistry education. As instructors' beliefs influence their classroom…

When higher education instructors introduce changes in teaching and assessment strategies to meet either personal or institutional goals, they often navigate practical and political challenges alone. This study investigates the perspectives of Norwegian university instructors in their effort to replace lectures and exams with a series of…

Bias assessment (systematic errors) is fundamental in industry and service laboratories, where reliable results must be obtained to give correct answers to specific problems. Therefore, knowledge and practice in quality methodologies is of fundamental importance for students. Unfortunately, laboratory lessons often focus on connecting theory and…

The present study has two main goals. First, it aims to examine the analogies an instructor uses about "DNA conservation across generations" in a university-level General Biology course. Second, it aims to examine the analogies used in those lessons according to Thiele and Treagust's framework. A qualitative case study design is adopted…

This paper examines the pedagogical integration of Virtual Microscopes (VMs) in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), to identify best practice and improve online pedagogy. It has captured the perspectives of 12 Health and Earth Science university teachers, through in-depth interviews, about the current integration of the VM in online teaching,…

Optimizing the workload of university students is important for their academic performance and student experience. Large perceived workloads are associated with poorer academic performance and lower student satisfaction in university students. In response to student feedback in 2021, we redesigned a second-year undergraduate physiology subject to…

There is widespread misuse of statistics in research, particularly in the life sciences, which is one of the contributing factors to reproducibility concerns in research. However, the formal quantitative training that life sciences research trainees receive is often quite limited. Our survey of statistics requirements in undergraduate life…

Physics education has been identified as one of the public sectors that are mostly influenced by technological developments. This paper adopted the quasi-experimental pre- and post-test design to assess the effects of multimedia-aided technologies (MAT) on undergraduate students' performance in quantum physics (QP) at the University of Rwanda…

In theory, there is broad agreement among science education stakeholders that supporting the achievement of scientific literacy is crucial for citizens to make informed and critical decisions about socioscientific issues (SSI). Likewise, it is widely held that argumentation is an important component of scientific literacy. In practice, however,…

Physics is a subject requiring strong logical thinking, and writing a problem-solving path according to logical thinking can enhance students' knowledge and problem-solving ability. The purpose of the study was to explore the effects of problem presentation of different scaffolds (MAPS or dynamic figures) on students' physical problem solving.…

This article focuses on the learning of the Lewis representation at the transition from high school to university, in France. Indeed, this notion is taught both in high school and in the first year of higher education but with different methods, which seems to hinder the learners. In this work, we observe 11th grade and higher education classes…

COVID-19 caught everyone by surprise, and the situation quickly escalated from epidemic to pandemic. By February 21, 2020, the first positive case was reported in Lebanon, and following that, by March 12, 2020, the decision to close all educational institutes was put into effect. Online learning is not an approved form of education in Lebanon,…