On 12 Mar. 2020 Dickinson State University moved all classes to distance delivery (DD) in response to COVID-19. Faculty had only a brief opportunity to plan, as the turn-around to DD was very rapid. Meaningful laboratory exercises were needed for SOIL 210--Introduction to Soil Science. The senior author learned about the Science of Agriculture…

This study investigated the introduction of the second law of thermodynamics using the Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (semantic waves) among first year chemistry students. The aim of the study was to investigate the extent LTC (semantic waves) reduce the entropy concept's complexity and abstractness when introducing the second law of…

Technology-enhanced collaborative inquiry learning has gained a firm position in curricula across disciplines and educational settings and has become particularly pervasive in science classrooms. However, understanding of the teacher's role in this context is limited. This study addresses the real-time shifts in focus and distribution of teachers'…

Most of the research on student understanding of evolution by natural selection has focused on undergraduate biology courses for science majors. However, the majority of undergraduates in the United States will not enroll in a biology course for majors. In this study, we identify the extent of natural selection understanding that students acquire…

Digital badges are credentials earned via a digital presentation to demonstrate the mastery of a technique. They have been utilized in General Chemistry laboratory courses as an assessment tool and to document students' development of a skill. A digital badge assignment was developed for thin layer chromatography (TLC) and integrated into a…

In 2014, evolution through natural selection was introduced to the primary science National Curriculum in England for year 6 (ages 10-11). As teachers had little prior experience of teaching this concept, it provided a rare opportunity to study the effectiveness of different approaches. A study was developed to investigate the impact of…

This undergraduate dissertation project was designed to enhance organic and analytical chemistry skills of final year forensic science students. A modified Birch reaction method was employed to synthesize amphetamine from ephedrine and detect the most known byproduct of clandestine manufacture of amphetamines, e.g.,…

The COVID-19 pandemic has swiftly forced a change in learning strategies across educational institutions, from extensively relying on in-person activities toward online teaching. It is particularly difficult to adapt courses that depend on physical equipment to be now carried out remotely. This is the case for bioinformatics, which typically…

While scientists place high value on the scientific method, its relevance to everyday life is often opaque to nonscientists. In undergraduate teaching, its implementation is primarily apportioned to upper-level, laboratory science classes for majors. Herein we describe the modification of a recipe as a real-world project for learning the…

Two out-of-class formative assessments that have been developed and used in a General, Organic, and Biochemistry course are reported herein. The first assessment, called Daily Feedback, used the collaborative word processor, Google Docs. This assessment required students to place topics/objectives in one of three categories based on their level of…

We show how learning can be improved, beyond that shown in actively taught classrooms, by also transforming the homework using the principles of deliberate practice. We measure the impact of transforming the homework on student learning in a course that had already implemented an active approach to teaching in class. We compare performance on the…

The "Current Insights" feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three that explore how different types of stress can produce different educational outcomes, how studying by writing questions can…

The conventional physiology courses consist of theoretical lectures, clinical application seminars, numerical exercises, simulations, and laboratory practices. However, in subjects that involve relevant physical quantities, even students who successfully pass exams may be unable to realize the actual quantities involved. For example, students may…

This research explores whether classroom life (CL), textbooks (TE), and learning initiative (LI) are mediators between instruction (P) and science performance, as well as whether these mechanisms are moderated by gender. 484 eighth grade students completed the questionnaire with four subscales of P, LI, TE, and CL. For the needs of triangulation…

Many introductory astronomy courses include concepts related to basic stellar properties. In general, these are concepts that originate from the human perception of starlight. This observational aspect is not easy to incorporate in the classroom. We explore if these concepts could be developed using the built-in data in a planetarium software.…