Adult educators are committed to learning that encourages adults to see themselves and the world around them in more complex ways. They have therefore focused their practice on teaching with development in mind (Taylor, 2000; Lamoreaux, 2005). Recently, however, a colleague (Johnson, 2003) pointed the authors to a body of research that examines…

Despite student interest, the heart is often a poorly understood topic in biology. To help students understand this vital organ's physiology, the author created this investigation activity involving the mammalian heart and its role in the circulatory system. Students design, build, and demonstrate working artificial "hearts" to exhibit what they…

This paper investigates the issue of how emotions such as disgust influence students' self-efficacy belief in terms of mastering a dissection task and also how these affect their interest in the biology of the heart. Following models of intrinsic motivation and the development of motivation, we expected disgust to negatively impact on students'…

There is no agreement about the robustness of intuitive representations of the circulatory system and their susceptibility to change by instruction. In this paper, we analyse to what extent students with varying degrees of biology instruction and different ages (High School Health Science and Social Science students and first and final year…

The efficacy of clay modeling compared with cat dissection for human muscle identification was examined over two semesters at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, NY. The 181 students in 10 sections in this study were randomly distributed into control (cat dissection) and experimental (clay modeling) groups, and the results of the muscle…

Much research has shown the benefits of additional anatomical learning and dissection beyond the first year of medical school human gross anatomy, all the way through postgraduate medical training. We have developed an interactive method for teaching eye and orbit anatomy to medical students in their ophthalmology rotation at Duke University…

New literacies researchers have identified a core set of strategies for locating information, one of which is "reading a Web page to locate information that might be present there" (Leu et al. in: Rush, Eakle, Berger (eds) "Secondary school reading and writing: What research reveals for classroom practices," 2007, p. 46). Do middle-school, high…

Neuropathological and animal studies have implicated the hippocampus as having a possible role in autism. This study applied magnetic resonance imaging to the hippocampus of 35 autistic and 36 control subjects. Detailed MRI did not reveal differences in the volume of the hippocampus in autistic individuals. (Author/DB)

This discussion reconsiders issues of educational accountability. To do so, I report on a qualitative case study of a public elementary school that identified how a model of educational accountability threatened to punish educators through a sophisticated network of surveillance. Data indicated that district personnel used standardized tests to…

Despite reductions in the importance, time committed to, and status of anatomical education in modern medical curricula, anatomical knowledge remains a cornerstone of medicine and related professions. Anatomists are therefore presented with the challenge of delivering required levels of core anatomical knowledge in a reduced time-frame and with…

We collected think-aloud, pre-test, post-test, and motivation data from 43 undergraduates to examine the impact of conceptual scaffolds on the fluctuation of certain motivation constructs and use of self-regulatory processes during learning with hypermedia. Participants were randomly assigned to either the No Scaffolding (NS) or Conceptual…

The cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) is known to play a critical role in both transcription-independent short-term or intermediate-term memory and transcription-dependent long-term memory (LTM). Although distinct phases of LTM already have been demonstrated in some systems, it is not known whether these phases require distinct temporal patterns…

Because of the emphasis on high-stakes testing, art has often become a neglected subject. Research indicates that the teaching and integration of art increases academic performance and promotes engagement in other disciplines. Science provides stimulating potential for learning content, practicing observational skills, and expanding students'…

This study investigated the effectiveness of role play in a large undergraduate science class. The targeted population consisted of 298 students enrolled in 2 sections of an undergraduate Human Anatomy and Physiology course taught by the same instructor. The section engaged in the role-play activity served as the study group, whereas the section…

This article attempts to describe students' process of learning physics using the notion of experiencing variation as the basic mechanism for learning, and thus explores what variation, with respect to a particular object of learning, that students experience in their process of constituting understanding. Theoretically, the analysis relies on…