The present study aims to improve the quality and the effectiveness of Science Education in early grades along with the goals of UNESCO's emerging agenda for sustainable development and the 4th goal about quality in education. It examines the interaction between formal and non-formal education in designing and organizing complete educational…

In the present study we investigated experimentation abilities of children with learning problems in early childhood education, i.e. kindergarten (4-6 years old). An essential part of science education is learning via the scientific method, of which experimentation is the central component. We studied experimentation abilities in 28 kindergartners…

The current study aimed to provide elementary preservice teachers with an opportunity to engage in an authentic inquiry experience that shifted the focus from the hypothesis-testing model of inquiry to one that more accurately and completely reflected the process of scientific inquiry in its entirety. The aim of this qualitative case study was to…

Research in socioscientific issue (SSI)-based interventions is relatively new (Sadler in "Journal of Research in Science Teaching" 41:513-536, 2004; Zeidler et al. in "Journal of Research in Science Teaching" 46:74-101, 2009), and there is a need for understanding more about the effects of SSI-based learning environments…

A signature of life is that biological molecules occur as a single stereoisomer with respect to each chiral center, and this is echoed in the structures of biological polymers. Thus, circular dichroism (CD) has emerged as a hallmark of biomolecular structures. The tangible and familiar phenomenon of raw egg white's conversion from transparent…

Over the past decade, mechanistic cross-linking probes have been used to study protein-protein interactions in natural product biosynthetic pathways. This approach is highly interdisciplinary, combining elements of protein biochemistry, organic chemistry, and computational docking. Herein, we described the development of an experiment to engage…

A commercial hollow fiber blood oxygenation laboratory experiment was used to introduce lower level engineering students to mass balances in a two-phase system. Using measured values of concentration and flow rate, students calculated the rate of mass transfer from the gas phase and into the liquid phase, and compared the two values to determine…

The opportunity to engage in scientific research is an important, but often neglected, component of undergraduate training in biology. We describe the curriculum for an innovative, course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) appropriate for a large, introductory cell and molecular biology laboratory class that leverages students' high…

We demonstrate how the form of a plano-convex lens and a derivation of the thin lens equation can be understood through simple physical considerations. The basic principle is the extension of the pinhole camera using additional holes. The resulting images are brought into coincidence through the deflection of light with an arrangement of prisms.…

There is widespread agreement that an adequate understanding of the nature of science (NOS) is a critical component of scientific literacy and a major goal in science education. However, we still do not know many specific details regarding how students and teachers learn particular aspects of NOS and what are the most important feature traits of…

The topicality of the research is conditioned by the social and pedagogic, scientific and theoretical, and scientific and methodical aspects. With regard to this, the paper is aimed at revealing the dependence of the teacher's overall work capacity on the development of his/her professional expertise. The leading methods in studying this problem…

An inversion polymorphism of the filamin and emerin genes at the tip of the long arm of the human X-chromosome serves as the basis of an investigative laboratory in which students learn something new about their own genomes. Long, nearly identical inverted repeats flanking the filamin and emerin genes illustrate how repetitive elements can lead to…

A simple setup is designed to investigate a "time-of-flight" measurement of the speed of sound in water. This experiment only requires low cost components and is also very simple to understand by students. It could be easily used as a demonstration experiment.

A number of organisations have provided instructions on how to produce small quantities of liquid oxygen in the classroom using liquid nitrogen and a copper condensation coil (Lister 1995 "Classic Chemistry Demonstrations" (London: Royal Society of Chemistry) pp 61-2, French and Hibbert 2010 "Phys. Educ." 45 221-2). The method…

In this paper we present a reasoning line for introducing the Pauli exclusion principle in the context of an introductory course on quantum theory based on the sum over paths approach. We start from the argument originally introduced by Feynman in "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter" and improve it by discussing with students…