Students make and test a seemingly impossible material made from ice and sawdust that had been developed for possible emergency use during the Second World War. It was open to the students to be creative with their methods of testing the viability of such a material. The thought of making a battleship from ice that would gradually melt seems…

The transition from A-level to degree-level practical classes then to a research project, hence from dependent learner to independent researcher, is a hurdle that all students face when studying for a chemistry degree. This can be daunting so any innovations that aid this transition are of great value. At the University of Reading, the first year…

In the field of special education there is a dearth of group experimental studies that establish evidence-based practice. The effort to establish evidence-based practice has been associated with emphasizing experiments by using randomized controlled trial with large numbers of participants who are randomly assigned to a treatment. However,…

Personalized learning considers that the causal effects of a studied learning intervention may differ for the individual student. Making the inference about causal effects of studies interventions is a central problem. In this paper we propose the Residual Counterfactual Networks (RCN) for answering counterfactual inference questions, such as…

Automatic assessment and evaluation of team performance during collaborative tasks is key to the research on learning analytics and computer-supported cooperative work. There is growing interest in the use of gaze-oriented cues for evaluating the collaboration and cooperativeness of teams. However, collecting gaze data using eye-trackers is not…

This work presents the results of two-year-long pedagogical research, the aim of which was to demonstrate the applicability of the usage of a new strategy in education--Integrated e-Learning (INTe-L)--through its introduction into project-based physics teaching in Slovakia. The INTe-L strategy is built around the role of experiments and…

The rising costs of college tuition, housing, and textbooks can be a barrier to many who seek a certification or degree in a health profession field. Affordable open educational resources (AOER) are an attractive alternative to expensive course materials. The Health Sciences Department at Weber State University created a comprehensive, two…

Enzymatic activity is at the core of biological reactions. Understanding them and the chemical and environmental factors that affect reaction rates is critical for biology students. The laboratory experiment proposed here investigated these concepts, while requiring students to document, graph data, analyse results using statistics, and…

Although research and new technologies have introduced different ways of observing microorganisms, including scanning and electron microscopy, these methods are expensive and require equipment that is typically not found in a middle school classroom. The transmission-through-dye technique (TTD; Gregg et al., 2010), a new optical microscopy method…

As well-developed as they may be, standards are not curriculum. It is the job of teachers and curriculum teams to use the Standards as the basis for designing the specific pathway for teaching and learning. In this article, the authors explore the use of Understanding by Design (UbD), a widely-used curriculum development framework, for honoring…

The laboratory instruction sheet (sometimes called a laboratory manual), together with the equipment used by students, is an essential resource for laboratory work. It has a direct influence over all the interactions that can occur in the laboratory activity, of which student-equipment is the only common synchronous interaction in both…

This research explored dream science classrooms of primary school third and fourth-grade students. Research is designed as a case study. The students were first asked to illustrate their dream science classroom and produce a short description of their drawings. Second, they were asked to write their expectations of their teachers, their…

This study concerns a framework for designing Teaching-Learning Sequences that aims to integrate the implementation of scientific practices in the context of daily problems. Said framework consists of three stages (formulation of the design principles, instructional design and design of the learning activities). It is based on four design…

The difficulties students have in blending mathematics and physics are here analyzed, by focusing on the issue of a convergent series. We present an experimental and a theoretical analysis of some phenomena which can be investigated employing series, as the bouncing marble and Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the turtle. Measurements were carried…

In the course of PISA and TIMSS a lot of out-of-school lab days have been established; as non-formal extracurricular learning environments they shall provide an efficient addition to formal learning at school. The "ELKE" project is a non-formal extracurricular learning lab that aims at linking curricular content and competence-centred…