Our research objective focused on monitoring students' mental effort and cognitive achievement to unveil potential effects of an instructional change in an out-of-school laboratory offering gene technology modules. Altogether, 231 students (12th graders) attended our day-long hands-on module. Within a quasi-experimental design, a treatment group…

In 2005 India introduced a new National Curriculum Framework aimed at providing a more constructivist approach to learning for all subjects. Previous research on the impact of curriculum reform in other countries (e.g., United States) concluded that for reform to be successful teachers' orientations toward teaching and learning must be considered…

This three-year Virtual Measurements Environment curriculum development project for higher education within the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union is the result of intense collaboration among four institutions, teaching applied sciences and technology. It aims to apply the principles and possibilities of evolved distance and…

"Visualization" of chemical phenomena often has been limited in the teaching laboratories to the sense of sight. We have developed chemistry experiments that rely on senses other than eyesight to investigate chemical concepts, make quantitative determinations, and familiarize students with chemical techniques traditionally designed using only…

Inquiry-based laboratory experiments can play an important role for students in developing concepts and promoting deeper understanding. This study examined students' ability to differentiate between guided- and open-inquiry laboratories near the end of a semester of general chemistry at a large southwestern university that utilized both types of…

An account of peculiar light patterns produced by reflection in a pool under falling rain droplets was recently reported by Molesini and Vannoni (2008 Eur. J. Phys. 29 403-11). The mathematical approach, however, only covered the case of a symmetrical location of a light source and the observer's eyes with respect to the vertical of the falling…

How do we model and improve technical problem solving, such as network subnetting? This paper reports an experimental study that tested several hypotheses derived from Kolb's experiential learning cycle and Huber's problem solving model. As subjects solved a network subnetting problem, they mapped their mental processes according to Huber's…

We report a school project which equips students with both theoretical and practical knowledge in material physics. We construct dumpling skins from a mixture of flour and water. A series of experiments is then conducted to quantify the toughness, hardness, and tensile strength of the skins, and how they are affected by adding other materials into…

The cloud has become a widely used term in academia and the industry. Education has not remained unaware of this trend, and several educational solutions based on cloud technologies are already in place, especially for software as a service cloud. However, an evaluation of the educational potential of infrastructure and platform clouds has not…

Personalized medicine refers to medical care that involves genetically screening patients for their likelihood to develop various disorders. Commercial genome screening only involves identifying a consumer's genotype for a few single nucleotide polymorphisms. A phenotype (such as an illness) is greatly influenced by three factors: genes, gene…

Nanoscience, or the study of the world at the size of a billionth of a meter, has the potential to help students see how all of the sciences are related. Behavior of materials at the nanoscale differs from materials at the macroscale. This article introduces three nanoscale properties and how they relate to various science domains. Three…

Experimental work on ultrafiltration is presented to illustrate the practical and theoretical principles of this separation technique. The laboratory exercise comprises experiments with pure water and with aqueous "Saccharomyces cerevisiae" (from commercial Baker's yeast) suspensions. With this work students detect the characteristic phenomena…

A crystal model laboratory exercise is presented that allows students to examine relations among the microscopic-macroscopic-symbolic levels, using crystalline mineral samples and corresponding crystal models. Students explore the relationship between solid-state structure and crystal form. Other structure-property relationships are explored. The…

Every day, tens of thousands of chemists use analytical atomic spectroscopy in their work, often without knowledge of possible interferences. We present a unique approach to study these interferences by using modern response surface methods to visualize an interference in which aluminum depresses the calcium atomic absorption signal. Calcium…

In this experiment the carotenoid bixin is isolated from annatto ("Bixa orellana") seeds using column chromatography. The experiment has several key advantages over previous pigment separation experiments. First, unlike other experiments significant quantities of the carotenoid (typically 20 to 25 mg) can be isolated from small quantities of plant…