The objective of this design case was to describe the development of an online graph-oriented tool to support the representation of collaborative argumentation for middle school students from a faculty expert's perspective and discuss the processes that were instrumental in developing the tool. Supported by the professional staff in the Digital…

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in our understanding of the social behaviour of microbes. Here, we take advantage of these developments to present an undergraduate laboratory exercise that uses the cooperative flocculating behaviour of yeast ("Saccharomyces sp.") to introduce the concept of inclusive fitness and teach the…

Student reasoning about cases of natural selection is often plagued by errors that stem from miscategorising selection as a direct, causal process, misunderstanding the role of randomness, and from the intuitive ideas of intentionality, teleology and essentialism. The common thread throughout many of these reasoning errors is a failure to apply…

As has been widely discussed, the National Research Council's (NRC) current policy in United States education advocates supporting students toward acquiring skills to engage in scientific practices. NRC policy also suggests that supporting students in the practices of science may require different approaches than what is required for supporting…

Multiple reports highlight the increasingly quantitative nature of biological research and the need to innovate means to ensure that students acquire quantitative skills. We present a tool to support such innovation. The Biological Science Quantitative Reasoning Exam (BioSQuaRE) is an assessment instrument designed to measure the quantitative…

With growing interest in promoting skills related to the scientific process, we studied performance in solving ill-defined problems demonstrated by graduating biochemistry majors at a public, minority-serving university. As adoption of techniques for facilitating the attainment of higher-order learning objectives broadens, so too does the need to…

The purpose of this study is to explore the strength of relationships between 7th grade students' Scientific Process Skills (SPS), Nature of Science (NOS) beliefs, and Scientific Creativity (SC) through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). For this purpose, data were collected from 332 students of two public middle school students in Turkey. SPS,…

Capillary electrophoresis is an important analytical separation method used to study a wide variety of samples, including those of biological origin. Capillary electrophoresis may be covered in the classroom, especially in advanced analytical courses, and while many students are exposed to gel electrophoresis in biology or biochemistry…

This research explores how scaffolding students' reflections on scientific modeling criteria influence the students' views on scientific models, development of explanatory models, and understanding of scientific models. This research recruited treatment groups and comparison groups in middle schools and high schools. The treatment groups adopted a…

Science students should undertake engineering design projects and carry out scientific investigations, as recommended by the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013). However, studies show that students misconstrue the goals of science and engineering and are uncertain about their respective practices (Gilbert and Wade…

Computational thinking (CT) parallels the core practices of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and is believed to effectively support students' learning of science and math concepts. However, despite the synergies between CT and STEM education, integrating the two to support synergistic learning remains an important…

The aim of this research was to examine the effect of integration of STEM disciplines into Toulmin's argumentation model on students' academic achievement, reflective thinking, and psychomotor skills. To be able to get this aim, a quasi-experimental method was used. The participants were 40 sixth grade middle school students divided into two…

This study focuses on the teachers' predictions of the students' performances -- in particular the middle-low achievers -- while solving tasks testing inquiry competencies. The tasks come from PISA science. More specifically we study science teachers' predictions for several aspects: levels of difficulty of the tasks, the potential sources of…

To better prepare physiology students for 21st century careers, we incorporated classroom-based undergraduate research experiences and service learning/community-engaged learning (SLCE) into a college-level physiology laboratory course. The interventions were incorporated over 4 yr and assessed using validated surveys of student-reported learning…

Designed as participatory action research, this study aims to develop authentic tasks as assessment and evaluation activities in an undergraduate special education course, and to examine the impact of these tasks on students' experiences, viewpoints and feelings during the implementation processes. The study group was comprised of 205 student…