Argumentation is believed to be a significant component of scientific inquiry: introducing these skills into laboratory work may be regarded as a goal for developing practical work in school science. This study explored the impact on the quality of argumentation among 12- to 13-year-old students undertaking three different designs of…

Screen-based microscopes allow for a shared visualisation and task-directed conversations that offer significant pedagogic advantages for the science disciplines involving observation of natural samples such as the geosciences and biosciences, and particularly for distance education in these disciplines. The role and development of a virtual…

Recent initiatives in the laboratory curriculum have encouraged an inquiry-based approach to learning and teaching in the laboratory. It has been argued that laboratory instruction should not just be hands-on, but it should portray the essence of inquiry through the process of experiential learning and reflective engagement in collaboration with…

Practical skills and competencies are critical to student engagement and effective learning in laboratory courses. This article describes the design of a yearlong, stand-alone laboratory course--the Biotechniques Laboratory--a common core course in the second year of all our degree programs in the biological sciences. It is an enabling,…

The speed of sound is a physical property that can be measured easily in the lab. However, finding an inexpensive and intuitive way for students to determine this speed has been more involved. The introduction of affordable consumer-grade high-speed cameras (such as the Exilim EX-FC100) makes conceptually simple experiments feasible. Since the…

While the editors of "Across the Disciplines" were working at the Michigan State University (MSU) Writing Center in 2011, they began focusing on the issues of graduate writing support through their involvement with the graduate writing groups hosted through the MSU Writing Center, conducting research on the benefits of such groups. When…

The authors investigated the impact of changing student-TA relations to include a sense of mentoring by redesigning TA allocations so that students worked with the same TA throughout the semester, but without changing student-to-TA ratios.

The UK government aims to increase both the number, and also the status, of workers with intermediate-level skills, with a view to creating a "modern class of technicians" who can help to bolster economic growth and prosperity. This article considers the prospects for such a policy by focusing on one particular, but neglected, group of…

Increasing numbers of deaf students in the health professions require accommodations in the clinical setting to ensure effective learning and accurate communication. Although classroom learning barriers have long been identified and addressed, barriers to clinical education have been far less analyzed. Operating room clerkships, which include many…

The general chemistry laboratory is an appropriate place for learning chemistry well. It is also effective for stimulating higher-order thinking skills, including reflective thinking, a skill that is crucial for science teaching as well as learning. This study aims to examine the effects of feedback-supported reflective journal-keeping activities…

The aim of this study is to develop an instructional design model for science laboratory instruction. Well-known ID models were analysed and Dick and Carey model was imitated to produce a science laboratory instructional design (SLID) model. In order to validate the usability of the designed model, the views of 34 high school teachers related to…

A Chinese version of the Science Laboratory Environment Inventory (SLEI) was used to study the students' perceptions of the actual and preferred laboratory learning environments in Hong Kong junior secondary science lessons. Valid responses of the SLEI from 1932 students of grade 7 to grade 9 indicated that an open-ended inquiry approach seldom…

Several medical schools have recently described new innovations in interprofessional interactions in gross anatomy courses. The Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT has developed and implemented two contrasting interprofessional experiences in first-year medical student gross anatomy dissection laboratories:…

The main purposes of this study were to identify Taiwanese university students' physics learning profiles in terms of their critical conceptions of learning physics and to compare their physics learning self-efficacy with the different learning profiles. A total of 250 Taiwanese undergraduates who were majoring in physics participated in this…

A multipart laboratory activity introducing microbeads was created to meet engineering and engineering design practices consistent with new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Microbeads are a current topic of concern as they have been found to cause adverse impacts in both marine and freshwater systems resulting in multiple states proposing…