In a 1984 essay, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago, asserted that tutoring offered "the best learning conditions we can devise" and that tutors could raise student achievement by two full standard deviations--or, in statistical parlance, two "sigmas." The influence of Bloom's two-sigma…

Improving the interest of high-school students towards chemistry (and science in general) is one of the goals of the Italian Ministry of Education. To this aim, we designed a context-based activity that actively involved students in six different laboratory experiences interconnected by a case study of the murder of Miss Scarlet, from the famous…

The classic technique for sulfate analysis in an undergraduate quantitative analysis lab involves precipitation as the barium salt with barium chloride, collection of the precipitate by gravity filtration using ashless filter paper, and removal of the filter paper by charring over a Bunsen burner. The entire process is time-consuming, hazardous,…

This study investigated whether or not lab type, traditional lab or virtual lab, influenced students' engagement. To measure student engagement six students were videoed over the course of an 18-week semester while conducting 10 lab experiments. To analyze student engagement, a systematic visual comparison in the tradition of single case research…

Teachers engaging in research has been discussed and carried out under the heuristics and methodologies of action research (Manfra, 2019; Pine, 2009). A typical action research project might involve an individual teacher studying the effectiveness of a specific instructional strategy like having students preview content before receiving direct…

A lab activity for teaching physics students the fundamentals of statistical analysis during the first few weeks of instruction is described. This activity involves students timing a pulse of light generated by an Arduino device of fixed duration with individual timers (e.g. stopwatch, iPhone timer). To select the most precise timing methods and…

There are many physics experiments with long time scales such that they are usually neither shown in the physics class room nor in student labs. However, they can be easily recorded with time-lapse cameras and the respective time-lapse videos allow qualitative and/or quantitative analysis of the underlying physics. Here, we present some examples…

This study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of student-generated videos as a supplement to teaching assistant (TA) instruction in an undergraduate organic chemistry laboratory. Three videos covering different aspects of lab instruction (experimental technique, use of instrumentation, and calculations) were produced using…

We use analogies to provide introductory laboratory students intuition into measurement uncertainties. Using a battery-resistor circuit we discuss uncertainty concepts and derive expressions for uncertainty of the mean and sums of uncertainties. Finally, we draw attention to the fact that the interpretation of standard deviation as uncertainty…

Engaging undergraduates in the environmental consequences of fossil fuel usage primes them to consider their own anthropogenic impact, and the benefits and trade-offs of converting to renewable fuel strategies. This laboratory activity explores the potential contaminants (both inorganic and organic) present in the raw fuel and solid waste…

NMR spectroscopy has great potential as an instrumental method for environmental chemistry research and monitoring but may be underused in teaching laboratories because of its complexity and the level of expertise required in operating the instrument and interpreting data. This laboratory experiment introduces environmental NMR spectroscopy to…

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of an educational game that is used for teaching the mechanisms of the action potentials in cell membranes. The game was composed of pieces representing the intracellular and extracellular environments, ions, ion channels, and the Na+-K+-ATPase pump. During the game activity, the students arranged…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of designing problem-based experiments (DPBE) on the level of metacognitive skills of prospective science teachers. For this purpose, pre test-post test design, without control group, was used in the research. The research group of the study comprised 113 second-grade prospective science…

Students in the Didactic Program in Dietetics (DPD) at the University of Maine were exposed to the cheese-making process, within a lab setting of two hours, utilizing an accelerated recipe for a Queso Fresco-style cheese. The purpose of this project was to provide students with a novel, hands-on learning experience, which covered concepts of…

We demonstrate how students' use of modeling can be examined and assessed using student notebooks collected from an upper-division electronics lab course. The use of models is a ubiquitous practice in undergraduate physics education, but the process of constructing, testing, and refining these models is much less common. We focus our attention on…