Promotion of students' scientific literacy has long been and continues to be a central goal for reform efforts in science education. Although there is a great number of research conducted to evaluate student's scientific literacy, less is known about how we can improve students' scientific literacy through variety of scientific practices. In this…

Over the past several decades, science education reform has emphasized moving from content driven courses to more interactive, inquiry-based methodologies. This change has been supported by research by Chi (2009) and represented as three-dimensional learning in the Next Generation Science Standards (NRC, 2013). The typical structure of many high…

Given the emphasis placed on laboratory reform and student engagement in authentic science practice, this manuscript outlines the development of a hybrid project-based laboratory (HPBL) curriculum centered around specific instructor goals and provides examples on how those goals were met by the experiments and how the change in curriculum affected…

Understanding human behavior and reasoning is essential for developing successful instruction. Discipline-based education researchers have examined how students learn, informing the development of successful instructional strategies. Researchers have also identified barriers to the successful implementation of such strategies. This work utilizes…

Laboratory course activities often focus on "cookbook style," so their activities have not yet integrated with scientific thinking as an essential aspect. In this research, the laboratory experience of microbial analysis techniques was redesigned using alternative inquiry to involve students in isolating and characterising yeast to make…

America's future depends upon its citizens' basic science literacy. Soon the country will be relying on students in classrooms today to spur the discoveries needed to save lives, stave off disease, and protect the planet and to join the wide swath of professions that once did not require such knowledge and skills but now do. All students deserve…

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, all teachers' training courses scheduled for summer 2020 had to transition to online formats. For the arts-integrating course "Teaching Chemistry by a Creative Approach", this shift jeopardized the course's essence, since learning by this approach is based on creative, hands-on, and active learning. Here…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to: (1) explore existing practices of STEM faculty at a private Lebanese university and (2) assess the extent of implementation of active learning among faculty members of selected STEM departments. Design/methodology/approach: The Working Group on "Integrating Modern Scientific teaching methodologies in…

School pedagogies that expand opportunities for learners to build and use knowledge for meaningful purposes are resources for hope. Internationally, standards-based reforms in science education position schooling as a context for building and using disciplinary knowledge to explain phenomena and solve problems. There is also growing research…

In the last 30 years, there has been an ongoing discussion about the effectiveness of Professional Development (PD) programs, which aims to promote reform-based Science Education (SE). Among the many, different trends of reform-based science teaching, inquiry-based approaches hold a dominant role. This study shows how teachers' practices were…

This research seeks to understand how secondary science students make space for themselves in the classroom. Specifically, this study examines the interplay between classroom structures and students' agentic negotiations while identifying the relationship between students' enacted agency and their authored science identities by drawing from a…

In mid-March 2020, due to the novel coronavirus, my 300-level Environmental Sampling Methods lecture/laboratory course transitioned to distance learning. After this move, the primary focus of the course became the laboratory. To do this, I revised my three remaining laboratory exercises (i.e., water quality, soil quality, environmental microbes)…

Recent reform efforts in postsecondary science teaching have called for shifts in instructional methods to include more evidence-based instructional practices. However, a myriad of factors play a role in whether an instructor adopts these more student-centered methods. One such factor is teaching perspective. In this study, we explored the…

We describe the design and implementation of a teaching-learning sequence that was started before the lockdown and was then transformed for distance teaching. A backward design approach was adopted in order to identify clear learning outcomes. The activities were outlined according to an inquiry-based learning paradigm, referring to research-based…

The rise of technology and online approaches has challenged the traditional learning and teaching model for first year chemistry of formal face-to-face lectures and in-person laboratory sessions. The COVID-19 pandemic since 2020 has created a rapidly changing environment in assessment and learning experiences for students and led to rapid adoption…