This study explores one teacher's instructional method for teaching life sciences using argumentation and argumentative writing rather than simple templates for writing claims and evidence. The microethnographic discourse analytic case study reported here included the teacher and 26 "advanced" eighth-grade students in a suburban middle…

Background: This auto-ethnographic study describes research conducted in a science teacher education program at a state university in Turkey, where I had taught the 'laboratory applications' course for the four previous years. While the students learned the basic skills needed to implement a laboratory course, I detected some deficiencies in their…

Amid calls for more practice-based teacher education, this article presents a concrete illustration of a practice-based bridging strategy for preparing high school biology teachers to enact open-inquiry labs. Open-inquiry labs were considered a core practice frame that served as a context for identifying core practices and for giving coherence to…

The central goal of this exploratory study was to characterize the effects of experiments involving different levels of inquiry on the nature of college students' written reflections about laboratory work. Data were collected in the form of individual lab reports written using a science writing heuristic template by a subset of the students…

This study investigated the possible connection between effective laboratory activities and student performance on lecture exams. In a traditional undergraduate organic chemistry course for non-science majors, students could predict the products of organic reactions, but struggled to provide reaction mechanisms for those same reactions, despite…

This study compared the performance of students using the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach and students using a standard or traditional laboratory curriculum on lecture exams and a laboratory practical exam on a specific topic, chemical equilibrium. The SWH helps students do inquiry science laboratory work by structuring the laboratory…

The purpose of this study was to reconstruct writers' reasoning process as reflected in their written texts. The codes resulting from the text analysis were related to cognitive operations, ranging from simple to more sophisticated ones. The sequence of the cognitive operations as the text unfolded represents the writer's cognitive pathway at the…

Graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are hired to assume some of the teaching duties in large general chemistry programs. They serve as liaisons between students enrolled in the course and the professor in charge. Being assigned to teach immediately on arrival at graduate school may be overwhelming to novice graduate students. When sending them into…

The Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) is an instructional technique that combines inquiry, collaborative learning, and writing to change the nature of the chemistry laboratory for students and instructors. The SWH provides a format for students to guide their discussions, their thinking, and writing about how science activities relate to their own…