This article presents ideas and narratives of an experiment on the concept of energy developed for an honors seminar on energy and a mechanics course. We argue that energy is an idea best taught in an interdisciplinary manner. While most physics courses explore ideas such as mechanical energy and conservation of energy, it is imperative that a…

Although undergraduate research experience has proven to have positive effects on student outcomes, such opportunities are not always widely available. Options can be especially limited for early-career engineering students who have limited research experience. One approach to addressing this issue is to partner engineering instructors with active…

Students must be able to evaluate primary literature, yet few options exist within the undergraduate curriculum to develop the necessary skills. In this article, we offer an adapted journal club that provides students opportunities to critically analyze selected research articles, emphasizing scientific communication, critical thinking, and…

Transdisciplinary learning--where students develop and apply knowledge from multiple disciplines to solve open-ended problems--is necessary to prepare students for the most pressing real-world problems. Because transdisciplinary education often requires reimagining the content and design of undergraduate science courses, it can be a challenge for…

Despite the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of STEM, teaching interdisciplinarity in the classroom is difficult and students struggle to find the applicability of concepts and skills in different scientific disciplines. In this work we propose a micro-credential "badge" system called Demonstrated Understanding of Core Knowledge (DUCK)…

The ability to engage in informed decision-making about socioscientific issues (SSI) is an important aspect of scientific literacy. Although science knowledge and practice are necessary for developing solutions to SSI, additional skills are also needed to attend to the complex social, political, economic, and ethical concerns of such issues.…

A perennial goal of science educators is to develop functional scientific literacy in their students, especially those who will not become professional scientists. This article provides an example of implementing a socioscientific issues approach in an undergraduate environmental science course that enables students to develop the knowledge,…

This article presents a semester-long, interdisciplinary project-based learning (PBL) suitable for secondary and postsecondary students enrolled in a second-semester (i.e., intermediate) meteorology course. This case-study approach builds on the research question "What atmospheric conditions lead to tornadoes, hail, and damaging winds…

Environmental science classes often ask students to examine changes in species or their environments to determine the human impact on a particular habitat or ecosystem. It is not always practical to take students out for a field study to do this kind of analysis; instead, the scientific method and diversity analyses can be utilized while students…

An interdisciplinary Pop-Up Learning Community (PLC) allowed students from various disciplines with different levels of content knowledge to discuss their perspectives on and beliefs about climate change. The impact of this event on students' climate change beliefs was gauged by a survey from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. This…

Evidence-based pedagogies to improve student success in STEM disciplines are now recognized, but their successful incorporation can be hampered by faculty wariness of novel pedagogical research. To support these pedagogies' effective implementation, a research team at a southeastern Historically Black College and University (HBCU) provided its…

The Coronavirus outbreak allows for a number of possible applications to classroom teaching (biology, computer science, Earth science, physics, statistics), as well as student research. A number of simple models reproduce fairly well the case numbers (total confirmed cases) of the Coronavirus pandemic in specific regions. These models may also be…

This article presents a synopsis of an interdisciplinary literacy-science, cross-country, fully remote service-learning (S-L) project prompted by and executed during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article shares discussions, analyses, and evaluations from both community partners (staff of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences…

We propose cross-disciplinary learning as a construct that can guide instruction and assessment in programs that feature sequential learning across multiple science disciplines. Crossdisciplinary learning combines insights from interdisciplinary learning, transfer, and resources frameworks and highlights the processes of resource activation,…

This article describes and illustrates a physics course for first-year college students whose only knowledge of physics is that they do not like the subject. The physics content is driven entirely by what appears in the daily newspapers and generally covers most physics topics in a semester. This course was structured as a learning community that…