The need for additional nursing and health care professionals is expected to increase dramatically over the next 20 years. With this in mind, students must have strong biomedical science knowledge to be competent in their field. Some studies have shown that participation in bioscience laboratories can enhance science knowledge. If this is true, an…

Reviews the use of a programmable hand-held calculator for evaluating a student's performance on a quantitative laboratory experiment. (SL)

Described is a nontraditional approach to the evaluation of laboratory instruction in general physics courses which focuses on the identification of telling questions, key concepts and basic phenomena involved in the experiment, description of the method used, and the results. (DS)

Describes a performance assessment protocol that rates six goals: (1) methodology of research, (2) use of equipment, (3) accuracy in measurement, (4) application of concepts and formulas, (5) use of mathematics, and (6) completeness and clarity. Provides an example performance task evaluation sheet. (MVL)

Describes scientific collaboratories as environments where researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, and accessing information in digital libraries. Focuses on an evaluation study that compared undergraduates working…

An observational instrument called the Laboratory Interaction Categories-Student (LIC) is described. The LIC is an easily understandable and usable tool for assessing pupil laboratory performance. (MP)

The Modified-Revised Science Teacher's Behavior Inventory (MR-STBI) was used in earlier studies to analyze the teaching strategies emphasized in instruction in science classrooms. This analysis showed changes in teaching strategies that occurred as a result of science teachers' professional development through longer-term modeled,…

The use of of the Automatic Interaction Detector (program AID3 of the OSIRIS statistical package) to study a university program is discussed. The performance of students who took general physics lecture and laboratory concurrently is compared to the performance of those who took them separately. Five years of data are analyzed, covering 1,997…

The widespread deployment and use of Information Technologies (IT) has paved the way for change in many fields of our societies. The Internet, mobile computing, social networks and many other advances in human communications have become essential to promote and boost education, technology and industry. On the education side, the new challenges…