The undergraduate years are a turning point in producing scientifically literate citizens and future scientists and engineers. Evidence from research about how students learn science and engineering shows that teaching strategies that motivate and engage students will improve their learning. So how do students best learn science and engineering?…

Science educators, historians of science and their students often share a curiosity about historical instruments as a tangible link between past and present practices in the sciences. We less often integrate instruments into our research and pedagogy, considering artefact study as the domain of museum specialists. We argue here that scholars and…

This study aimed to investigate the models that co-existed in students' cognitive structure to explain the interactions between electric charges and uniform magnetic fields. The sample consisted of 129 first-year civil engineering, geology and geophysics students from a large state university in western Turkey. The students answered five…

This study aims to explore problem-based learning (PBL) in conjunction with students' confidence in the basic ideas of electromagnetism and their motivational orientations and learning strategies. The 78 first-year geology and geophysics students followed a three-week PBL instruction in electromagnetism. The students' confidence was assessed…

An international symposium was convened to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the John Murray Expedition to the Indian Ocean on board the Egyptian research vessel Mabahiss (1933-1934). This report describes the symposium and provides abstracts and syntheses of the papers presented in the various marine scientific disciplines covering the areas of…

Describes a proposal for a new physics program for geology majors at the University of Rome based on a problem-oriented approach and extending the range of physics concepts covered by more traditional courses. Emphasis is put on applying physical concepts to geological problems. (Author/SK)