Social justice is increasingly being seen as relevant to the science curriculum. We examine the intersection of participatory science, social justice, and higher education in the United States to investigate how instructors can teach about social justice and enhance collaborations to work toward enacting social justice. Participatory science…

A national Task Force of 25 Australian physiology educators used the Delphi protocol to develop seven physiology core concepts that were agreed to nationally. The aim of the current study was to unpack the "physiological adaptation" core concept with the descriptor "organisms adjust and adapt to acute and chronic changes in the…

Introduction: As higher education continues to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), cognitive/behavioral neuroscience and other physiologically based psychology courses may face challenges incorporating DEI issues into the curriculum relative to other subfields of psychology. Statement of the Problem: Instructors of these courses may…

Author Mays Imad, who is a neuroscientist, writes that throughout her teaching career she has watched talented, creative, high-potential students walk away from the sciences because they feel that the STEM curriculum lacks ethical, political, and creative significance. One of her students wrote to her, "Life is hard and the world feels drab…

There is much agreement among chemical education researchers that expertise in chemistry depends in part on the ability to coordinate understanding of phenomena on three levels: macroscopic (observable), sub-microscopic (atoms, molecules, and ions) and symbolic (chemical equations, graphs, etc.). We hypothesize this "level-coordination…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate students' energy literacy at a UK university, and recommends ways in which it can be enhanced using a behaviour change model. Developing students' energy literacy is a key part of the "greening" agenda, yet little is known about how students develop their ideas about energy use and energy saving at…

Curricular changes continue at United States medical schools and directors of gross anatomy, microscopic anatomy, neuroscience/neuroanatomy, and embryology courses continue to adjust and modify their offerings. Developing and supplying data related to current trends in anatomical sciences education is important if informed decisions are going to…

Active learning is becoming more prevalent in large science classrooms, and this study shows the impact on performance of being vocal during Socratic questioning in a General Chemistry course. 800 college students over a two year period were given a pre and post-test using the Chemistry Concept Reasoning Test. The pre-test results showed that…

Appeals to reform science education by policy makers are not new phenomena. To be sure, while science reform efforts have been ongoing occurrences for nearly six decades, perpetual educational reform efforts as a whole have been evolving and gaining momentum in number for more than a century. The general motivation for continual reform appears to…

A variety of e-learning theories, models, and strategy have been developed to support educational settings. There are many factors for designing good instructional settings. This study set out to determine functionality of mobile devices, students who already have, and the student needs and views in relation to e-learning settings. The study…

In this study, we investigated the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) that physics graduate teaching assistants (TAs) developed in the context of teaching a new introductory physics curriculum, "Matter and Interactions" ("M&I"). "M&I" is an innovative introductory physics course that emphasizes a unified framework for understanding the world and…

Institutions of higher learning are recently being held more accountable for the learning outcomes of their students. As such, universities have begun to actively measure and evaluate student learning and motivational outcomes in an effort to improve the successful outcomes of their students. To support this work, two studies were conducted to…

This research was conducted with 291 Junior/Intermediate (J/I) pre-service teachers in a ubiquitous laptop Bachelor of Education program at Nipissing University. The authors modeled a lesson using three different teaching styles using flight as the content medium, a specific expectation found in the Ontario Ministry of Education grade six Science…

The lack of academic engagement in introductory science courses is considered by some to be a primary reason why students switch out of science majors. This study employed a sequential, explanatory mixed methods approach to provide a richer understanding of the relationship between student engagement and introductory science instruction.…

We revised a sophomore-level genetics class to more actively engage the students in their learning. The students worked in groups on quizzes using the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique (IF-AT) and active-learning projects. The IF-AT quizzes allowed students to discuss key concepts in small groups and learn the correct answers in class. The…