Many students may not be aware that renewable biological materials can be converted into multiple bioproducts and biofuels using a biorefinery process, a more sustainable alternative to conventional crude oil refineries. By using waste from pineapple, a plant material that most students are familiar with, a biorefinery can be modeled to…

To improve understanding of preservice teacher acceptance and integration of virtual reality into science,?this study examined?individual?concerns to integrate?virtual reality into science instruction before and after a hands on intervention with virtual reality. Framed by the?Concerns-Based Adoption Model?using a mixed-method design, preservice…

Problems involving rotating systems analysed from an inertial frame, without invoking fictitious forces, is something that freshman students find difficult to understand in an introductory mechanics course. In this article we try to see what could be the factors that lead to this difficulty and propose a set of arguments that could be used to…

This article describes the use and advantages of the MATLAB-based program ReshmoBeam, developed to perform beam analysis, as it is done in statics courses of engineering curricula. An important goal of the article is to facilitate the dissemination of the program among faculty teaching these courses. The program is offered free to interested…

Dark matter is one of the most intriguing scientific mysteries of our time and offers exciting instructional opportunities for physics education in high schools. The topic is likely to engage and motivate students in the classroom and allows addressing open questions of the Standard Model of particle physics. Although the empirical evidence of…

The identification of high-leverage teaching practices that can be improved through targeted practice should contribute to the enhancement of teachers' facilitation of instruction and improve student learning outcomes. Researchers have begun to identify subject-specific teaching practices that are expected to enhance science teaching specifically.…

This paper describes the design and implementation of a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) sequence in chemistry that links a lower-division, organic chemistry course to an upper-division, analytical chemistry course. The focus of student research is on blood preservation using trehalose derivatives in order to mimic the…

To fully appreciate genetics, one must understand the link between genotype (DNA sequence) and phenotype (observable characteristics). Advances in high-throughput genomic sequencing technologies and applications, so-called "-omics," have made genetic sequencing readily available across fields in biology from applications in…

A discrete model of invasion by subversive alien bodysnatchers is constructed and analysed numerically as a proposed undergraduate project. Several extensions of the model are demonstrated, including a spatial system of ten planets arranged on a one-dimensional lattice, and we discuss some of the practical considerations that arise when…

This paper examines three in-service science teachers' use of argument-driven inquiry (ADI) instructional model in an urban school district. We explore the basis for teachers' adaptation of the ADI model. The data were collected through teacher interviews and classroom observations from three science teachers. Data analysis indicated that three…

Science as an enterprise has been and continues to be exclusionary, perpetuating inequities among whose voice is heard as well as what/whose knowledge is recognized as valid. Women, people of color, and persons with disabilities are still vastly outnumbered in science and engineering by their White, male counterparts. These types of imbalances…

The Community of Practice framework has been used theoretically and empirically to describe the diverse ways people learn from one another through social interaction in a variety of specific contexts. To date, most research of this genre has favored investigating the community and domain constructs of the theory over the authentic practice…

The future viability of the geosciences is challenged, since as a community we continue to lack demographic diversity representative of the wider population. Fundamentally, dominant cultural, historical, and socioeconomic factors contribute to the lack of diversity and those factors typically change slowly over generations. Proposals for more…

This paper describes an undergraduate biochemistry laboratory module consisting of a set of experiments designed around a purification scheme for bovine serum albumin (BSA). Students purify BSA from cow plasma by a combination of salt and acetone precipitation, equilibrium dialysis, ion exchange, and size exclusion chromatography. Students use the…

Many studies in science education research have found metacognition to be beneficial for undergraduate STEM students. Students do not necessarily know how to employ their metacognition without some training or prompting, and undergraduate chemistry instructors do not always have the capacity to instruct their students on metacognition. Thus, it…