Grading practices can send a powerful message to students about course expectations. A study by Henderson et al. ("American Journal of Physics" 72:164-169, 2004) in physics education has identified a misalignment between what college instructors say they value and their actual scoring of quantitative student solutions. This work identified three…

This qualitative study examined how college science faculty who teach introductory level undergraduate science courses including the fields of chemistry, biology, physics, and earth science, understand and define science and nature of science (NOS). Participants were seventeen science instructors from five different institutions in the…

We investigated the effect of modeling and visualization resources on upper-division, undergraduate and graduate students' performance on an open-ended assessment of their understanding of physical hydrology. The students were enrolled in one of five sections of a physical hydrology course. In two of the sections, students completed homework…

This research used a survey and interviews to find out which science subjects 174 Year 10 students wanted to study in Year 11 and why. The results showed that the major reasons students wanted to study a particular science subject were because they were interested in the subject matter and because they felt they would achieve well in that subject.…

The Earth sciences are newly marginalized in K-12 classrooms. With few high schools offering Earth science courses, students' exposure to the Earth sciences relies on the teacher's ability to incorporate Earth science material into a biology, chemistry, or physics course. ''G.E.T. (Geoscience Experiences for Teachers) in the Field'' is an…