In this article, the author shares how the two service dogs from Canine Assistants helped her realize her goal for her seven-year-old identical twin boys with cerebral palsy to be safer and independent. Connor's dog, Nadia, is a Black Labrador/ Golden Retriever mix. Chase's dog, Oakley, is a Standard Poodle/Golden Retriever mix. Nadia pushes…

Establishing appropriate relations between the basic and applied areas of behavior analysis has been of long and persistent interest to the author. In this article, the author illustrates that there is a direct relation between how hard an organism will work for access to an object or activity, as indexed by the largest ratio completed under a…

The Y chromosome is of great interest to students and can be used to teach about many important biological concepts in addition to sex determination. This paper discusses mutation, recombination, mammalian sex determination, sex determination in general, and the evolution of sex determination in mammals. It includes a student activity that…

Humans discount larger delayed rewards less steeply than smaller rewards, whereas no such magnitude effect has been observed in rats (and pigeons). It remains possible that rats' discounting is sensitive to differences in the quality of the delayed reinforcer even though it is not sensitive to amount. To evaluate this possibility, Experiment 1…

The goal of this series of experiments was to develop an operant choice procedure to examine rapidly the punishing effects of intravenous drugs in rats. First, the cardiovascular effects of experimenter-administered intravenous histamine, a known aversive drug, were assessed to determine a biologically active dose range. Next, rats responded on…

Infants are sensitive to biological motion, but do they recognize it as animate? As a first step towards answering this question, two experiments investigated whether 6-month-olds selectively attribute goals to shapes moving like animals. We habituated infants to a square moving towards one of two targets. When target locations were switched,…

Stanley Fish wrote a column for the "New York Times" entitled "Will the Humanities Save US?" Here, Fish asserted that the humanities can't save humans, and in fact they don't really "do" anything, other than give pleasure to "those who enjoy them." This sustained shrug elicited a blast of energetic and…

In a discussion about architecture, the author's students learned that architects must consider their client's needs when designing a home. To complement their study of bird migration in science class, the author decided to ask students to "think like a bird" in order to design wooden birdhouses that they could take home and actually use. This…

The zoo is a favorite field trip destination for young students. This lesson was created for use before their excursion to increase their awareness of camouflage as a pattern design in animals. In this article, the author describes how her students made an art project on camouflage. (Contains 1 online resource.)

In order to be successful, students must acquire the language of science for both oral and written communication. In this article we examine an oral language learning technique called choral repetition for its role in building literacy in the context of an animal physiology course. For 3 weeks, the instructor conducted choral repetitions of nine…

Selected 4-H youth participated in the Texas 4-H Livestock Ambassador program. Forty-five youth participated in the 3-day program delivered by university professors and staff, Texas AgriLife Extension faculty and industry representatives. An instrument was developed and administered to the Texas 4-H Livestock Ambassadors at the end of their first…

Conservation efforts such as the restoration of European bison or the support of wolf immigration into Germany are often socio-scientifically controversial. In many cases, disputes are based on individuals' threat perception and attitudes towards the animal involved. The herewith reported study provides qualitative insights into German…

"Nativeness" has been recognised for two decades now as a problematic concept within applied linguistics, yet other areas of language analysis have been slow to question it, with some continuing to treat it as a primordial fact of nature. This paper briefly examines the history of the "native speaker" and the shifts in thinking…

The perception of science as boring is a major issue for teachers at all instructional levels. Tertiary classes especially suffer from a reputation for being dry, instructor-centered, and irrelevant to the lives of students. However, previous research has shown that science can be interesting to students if it is presented in such a manner as to…

In a previous study, Adachi, Kuwahata, Fujita, Tomonaga & Matsuzawa demonstrated that infant Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) form cross-modal representations of conspecifics but not of humans. However, because the subjects in the experiment were raised in a large social group and had considerably less exposure to humans than to…