The California Community Colleges Workforce and Economic Development program (WED program) helps students, incumbent workers, business partners and industries develop skilled competencies in critical industry sectors. As a source for developing and implementing training and curriculum, the WED program is instrumental in helping the community…

The realisation to integrate science, ethics and morality is recognised with growing impetus in recent years (as noted with introducing the Australian Curriculum "Science as a Human Endeavour" strand), to develop sophisticated epistemologies of science, which includes an appreciation of the social context including ethical thinking. To…

Sustainable agriculture implies the use of products and practices that sustain production, protect the environment, ensure economic viability, and maintain rural community viability. Disagreement exists as to whether or not the products and practices of modern biotechnological support agricultural sustainability. The purpose of this study was to…

Of concern is an international trend of students' increasing reluctance to choose science courses in both their final years of secondary school and tertiary levels of education. Research into the phenomenon indicates an influencing factor to be the "uninteresting curriculum" (OECD "2006") of school science. This paper presents…

Knowledge spillovers from universities and other public research institutions (PRIs) are viewed as essential for innovation. Previous studies examining the impact of such spillovers have been confined to the West, and there are no comparable studies using empirical data from Japan that explore the relationship between spillovers from PRIs and…

Hairy root transformation has been widely adapted in plant laboratories to rapidly generate transgenic roots for biochemical and molecular analysis. We present hairy root transformations as a versatile and adaptable model system for a wide variety of undergraduate laboratory courses and research. This technique is easy, efficient, and fast making…

Adapted primary literature (APL) is a novel text genre that retains the authentic characteristics of primary literature. Learning through APL represents an educational intervention with an authentic scientific context. In this case study, we analyzed the 80-min discourse developed during the enactment of an article from an APL-based curriculum in…

Baltimore City Community College (BCCC) leveraged heightened student interest and enrollment in the sciences and allied health with Maryland's world-leading biotechnology industry to build a community college life sciences learning and research center right on the University of Maryland, Baltimore's downtown BioPark campus. The BCCC Life Sciences…

Northampton Community College (NCC) responded to an industry identified need within the regional biotechnology community for entry-level production workers in biomanufacturing. In an effort to meet this need and create a transitional program of study for dislocated and incumbent workers, NCC partnered with the local Workforce Investment Boards,…

The California Department of Education is in the process of revising the Career and Technical Education (CTE) Model Curriculum Standards. The Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) conducted an investigation of the draft version of the Health Sciences and Medical Technology Standards (Health Science). The purpose of the study is to…

The purpose of this investigation was to explore students' epistemic beliefs and conceptual understanding of biotechnology. Epistemic beliefs can influence reasoning, how individuals evaluate information, and informed decision making abilities. These skills are important for an informed citizenry that will participate in debates regarding areas in…

Context-aware ubiquitous learning (u-learning) is an innovative approach that integrates wireless, mobile, and context-awareness technologies to detect the situation of learners in the real world and provide adaptive support or guidance accordingly. In this paper, a context-aware u-learning environment is developed for guiding inexperienced…

The impact of biotechnologies on peoples' everyday lives continuously increases. Measuring young peoples' attitudes toward biotechnologies is therefore very important and its results are useful not only for science curriculum developers and policy makers, but also for producers and distributors of genetically modified products. Despite of…

As part of a multidisciplinary course that is cross-listed between five departments, we developed an undergraduate student laboratory experiment for culturing, isolating, and purifying the biopolymer, poly(3-hydroxybutyrate), PHB. This biopolyester accumulates in the cytoplasm of bacterial cells under specific growth conditions, and it has…

The undergraduate Bioengineering Program at Lehigh University was established as part of the university's Bioscience and Biotechnology Initiative with support from the National Science Foundation through a grant from its Division of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC). The objective here is to describe the program development and…