A one-hour guided discourse was designed to support developing the outreach communication skills of physics experts with middle school students. The participants consisted of 12 physics researchers who conduct research in the field of nanoscale science and technology (NST). The guided discourse consisted of a professional development task for…

Mastery of jargon terms is an important part of student learning in biology and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics domains. In two experiments, we investigated whether prelecture quizzes enhance memory for jargon terms, and whether that enhanced familiarity can facilitate learning of related concepts that are encountered…

The process of identifying threshold concepts invites experts to reflect on their discipline in a new way with the ultimate goal of improving learning and teaching. During a workshop to identify threshold concepts in biochemistry, we asked a group of natural scientists to explore "signification," a threshold concept from the humanities,…

In this experiment, students in a large undergraduate biology course were first exposed to the concepts without new technical vocabulary ("jargon") in a pre-class reading assignment. Their learning of the concepts and jargon was compared with that of an equivalent group of students in another section of the same course, whose pre-class…

Analogies are often helpful for students to grasp key physiological concepts; sometimes the technical jargon makes the concept seem more complex than it actually is. In this article the authors provide several analogies for information transfer processes that sometimes confuse students. For an analogy to be useful, of course, it needs to be…

A three-country study was undertaken to assess the educational efficacy of two textbooks authored by the researcher. The same texts were distributed to groups of student nurses in the United Kingdom, Cambodia, and Kenya. A data collection tool was developed to obtain quantitative data and to ask open-ended questions on how useful readers found the…

Students may use the technical engineering terms without knowing what these words mean. This creates a language barrier in engineering that influences student learning. Previous research has been conducted to characterize the difference between colloquial and scientific language. Since this research had not yet been applied explicitly to…

Molecular life science is one of the fastest-growing fields of scientific and technical innovation, and biotechnology has profound effects on many aspects of daily life--often with deep, ethical dimensions. At the same time, the content is inherently complex, highly abstract, and deeply rooted in diverse disciplines ranging from "pure…

Presents reasons why jargon should not be used in biology instruction. Argues that more hands-on science activities and relating learning to everyday living needs to occur in the science classroom. (PR)