The high school science laboratory provides a natural environment for students to learn through scientist-teacher partnerships. Scientists represent an excellent resource for teachers and students: They possess specialized knowledge and skills, have access to laboratory equipment and materials, and are immersed in a culture of collaborative…

Stress facilitates memory formation, but only when the stressor is closely linked to the learning context. These effects are, at least in part, mediated by corticosteroid hormones. Here we demonstrate that corticosterone rapidly facilitates synaptic potentiation in the mouse hippocampal CA1 area when high levels of the hormone and high-frequency…

Understanding the function of the distinct amygdaloid nuclei in learning comprises a major challenge. In the two studies described herein, we used c-Fos immunolabeling to compare the engagement of various nuclei of the amygdala in appetitive and aversive instrumental training procedures. In the first experiment, rats that had already acquired a…

At the 102nd annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) in Salt Lake City, Utah, members of the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching and faculty from around the world gathered to discuss educational genomics. The focus of the gathering was a series of presentations by faculty who have successfully incorporated genomics and…

Membrane transport is a fundamental concept that undergraduate students of cell biology understand better with laboratory experience. Formal teaching exercises commonly used to illustrate this concept are unbiological, qualitative, or intricate and time consuming to prepare. We have developed an exercise that uses uptake of radiolabeled nutrient…

The teacher's guide, "Microscopic Explorations: A GEMS Festival Guide" (Brady and Willard, 1998), is the result of a partnership between Great Explorations in Math and Science (GEMS), a program of the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS), the public science and curriculum development center of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Microscopy…

A 14-week, undergraduate-level Genetics and Population Biology course at Morgan State University was modified to include a demonstration of functional genomics in the research laboratory. Students performed a rudimentary sequence analysis of the "Caenorhabditis elegans" genome and further characterized three sequences that were predicted to encode…

The purpose of this brief paper is to provide insight into the kinds of work being done by an education research group in a US physics department. As will be evident, instructional technology raises many interesting questions and lends itself to a wide variety of studies. References and contacts are provided for readers wanting more detailed…

This study investigated associations between teacher-student interaction and students' attitudes towards chemistry among 497 tenth grade students from three independent schools in Singapore. Analyses supported the reliability and validity of a 48-item version of the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI). Statistically significant gender…

A laboratory experiment is presented for the upper-level undergraduate physical chemistry curriculum in which the ternary phase diagram of water, 1-propanol and n-heptane is measured using proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. The experiment builds upon basic concepts of NMR spectral analysis, typically taught in the undergraduate…

The kinetics experiments on the ligand-C[subscript 60] exchange reactions on (dihapto-[60]fullerene) pentacarbonyl tungsten(0), ([eta][superscript 2]-C[subscript 60])W(CO)[subscript 5], form an educational activity for the inorganic chemistry laboratory that promotes graphical thinking as well as the understanding of kinetics, mechanisms, and the…

The oil drop experiment is considered an important contribution to the understanding of modern physics and chemistry. The objective of this investigation is to study and contrast the views and understanding with respect to the experiment of physicists or philosophers of science with those of authors of physics or chemistry textbooks and…

In this article, the authors address the gap between the spirit of the national history standards and what now is occurring in middle grades classrooms constrained by state standards and the No Child Left Behind policy. The authors suggest that creating a lab-like classroom environment to promote historical inquiry offers one means to close that…

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's unmanned mission to Mars has inspired students throughout the United States and abroad to take part in a variety of science lessons and projects. These particular students get to sit down the hall from the Mars Exploration Rover navigational team and work on projects directly related to the…

Provides background information and considers a number of issues raised with reference to science education in Palestine. Presents survey results that show a need for more science laboratory rooms in all secondary schools, a reorganization of current rooms, improvements in the evaluation process in the laboratory class, and greater coverage of…