Quantitative reasoning (QR) is a key skill for undergraduate biology education. Despite this, many students struggle with QR. Here, we use the theoretical framework of student noticing to investigate why some students struggle with QR in introductory biology labs. Under this framework, what students notice when given new information and data…

The objective of the study is to assess the effectiveness of laboratory activities employing the Predict-Explain-Observe-Discuss-Explain (PEODE) approach in promoting gifted students' interpretation of everyday problems related to fundamental science concepts. This quasi-experimental study involved 54 gifted students enrolled in the Science and…

Group work is commonly adopted in university science laboratories. However, student small-group discourse in university science labs is rarely investigated. We aim to bridge the gap in the literature by characterizing student discourse group roles in inquiry-based science labs. The instructional context for this study was a summer program hosted…

Data show an increasing number of Catholic schools from elementary to tertiary levels in developing countries, especially countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. These new Catholic schools seem to follow the industrial-era school design trajectories. However, the exigencies of the 21st century require a paradigm shift, ensuring that Catholic schools move…

Biochemistry lab classes help students connect theory to real-world applications and develop practical, collaborative, and higher-order thinking skills. However, many students are unprepared, spending class time on protocols and equipment instead of higher-order learning. To improve preparation, digital gamified modules were created to replace…

With increasing emphasis on post-secondary readiness in core subjects such as English, Mathematics, and Science, educators in Career and Technical Education face significant challenges, including declining enrollment and the integration of updated curricula. This study aimed to address these issues within agricultural education by piloting a new…

The directional feature of Earth's geomagnetic field has been contributing to the technological development and prosperity of humankind since the invention of the magnetic compass navigation centuries ago. Today, for instance, magnetoresistance sensors are commonly used in nanosatellites and unmanned aerial vehicles for high accuracy geomagnetic…

Ion-selective electrodes are among the oldest and most important potentiometric sensing methods. In this experiment, students assemble their own reusable ion-selective electrode from glass tubes with an attached PTFE membrane, [(CH[subscript 3]CH[subscript 2]CH[subscript 2]CH[subscript 2]CH[subscript 2]CH[subscript 2]CH[subscript 2]CH[subscript…

This article describes low-cost well plates that can be used as alternative kits for microscale experiments. Although ordinary well plates are useful and convenient for microscale experiments, they are not cheap. We have developed well plates composed of plastic bottle caps with approximately 3cm diameter and cardboard containers. Plastic bottle…

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is commonly introduced to students in the classroom, but its hands-on use in undergraduate laboratories is far less common. The significant costs to purchase and maintain a traditional high-field NMR spectrometer means that many institutions cannot offer this service to their students. Benchtop NMR…

In the museum wing of the Greenslade house is a clock with a two-second pendulum about one meter long. This ticks once per second, and every time it passes through dead center it completes an electrical circuit. When I came to Kenyon in 1964, this system was used to send signals to a series of telegraph relays, which ticked once per second.…

The history of particle physics can be considered nothing less than a huge triumph for science. Over the course of a little more than a century of effort, our understanding of the world of atomic and subatomic physics went from a vague understanding of atoms, to one that is much more detailed. Early in this hundred-year-long period, we learned…

Concepts relating to enzymes and energy are central to understanding chemical and biological processes at the molecular level. Student learning of these crosscutting concepts can be challenging, so it is important to identify misconceptions and remediate them early, especially in introductory classes. Here we describe an activity in which…

The purpose of this study, grounded in the Achievement Goal Perspective Theory (AGPT) and a Caring framework, was to effectively adapt previously validated measures of caring, task-involving (CTI), and ego-involving (EI) climates for college exercise classes to the college biology laboratory setting. The items' measurement quality was assessed…

While several studies have investigated gender inequities in the social learning environment of biology lecture courses, that same phenomenon remains largely unexplored in biology laboratory contexts. We conducted a mixed methods study to understand the influence of gender on student perceptions of their peers' research aptitude in introductory…