The present study aimed to determine the impact of argument-based laboratory method on the scientific process skills of pre-service primary school teachers and their views on the nature of science. The study was designed based on the pretest-posttest quasi-experimental method and conducted with 64 sophomore pre-service primary school teachers (37…

STEM-related educational outreach offers students enriching opportunities to become more familiar with science, in terms of how it relates to their daily lives and with respect to possible career paths that they might want to follow. At the same time, graduate student trainees providing that outreach act as important resources for elementary and…

The science learning environment is an important factor in students' attitudes toward their science experiences in school, as well as toward science courses. This study compares how learning in different laboratory environments (hands-on or virtual) influences these attitudes for middle school (7th grade) students. Participants were 143…

This paper reflects on the process followed in the Swanson School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh to cultivate an innovative and entrepreneurial culture among students and faculty. As a member of the first cohort of the Pathways program, a strategic process was initiated to unlock the innovation capabilities of students and to feed…

An interactive, field-based course on the environmental aspects of natural water was developed as part of STEM initiatives at a comprehensive university in the United States. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation. The course is focused on two fundamental student skills, such as hydrologic field procedures and analytical methods.…

Purpose: Higher education institutions are widely known both for their promotion to education for sustainable development (ESD) and for their contribution as living labs to urban management strategies. As for strategies, smart and learning campuses have recently gained significant attention. This paper aims to report an air quality monitoring…

Previous studies on the effectiveness of virtual laboratories for learning have shown inconsistent results over the past decade. The purpose of this research was to explore the effects of a virtual laboratory and meta-cognitive scaffolding on students' data modeling competences. A quasi-experimental design was used. Three classes of eighth graders…

Change Laboratories are a methodology to deal with complex problems in society in order to both better understand these problems as well as to find potential solutions. They typically involve collaborative problem solving and solution seeking from practitioner's perspectives, conducted in a series of successive, structured workshops informed by…

Flipped classrooms provide students the opportunity to collaboratively solve challenging problems in class with help and scaffolding available from instructors. Because there are many ways to structure a flipped course, research on the effectiveness of flipping classrooms has produced mixed results. Therefore, it is important for researchers to…

Here we evaluate undergraduate student attitudes about science after each of three authentic research experiences in a semester of an introductory biology laboratory course at Utah State University. The three course-based research experiences (CUREs) vary in length and student freedom, and they cover different areas of biology. Students responded…

The writing center is a common form of academic writing support in Canadian and U.S. universities (Moussu & David, 2015). With its nonproofreading policy, some scholars have indicated the service may be less effective for international students who require more explicit assistance on surface-level features in their academic writing (Harris…

In a university third-year instrumental chemistry laboratory students build a laser based polarimeter for determining light scattering with commercially available optical components used in modern optics research laboratories. During this laboratory experiment, students learn that solutions containing molecules which scatter light also influence…

The abstractness of certain chemistry concepts demands the use of appropriate teaching strategies to enable students to construct mental images of the concepts. The concepts include understanding the effects of concentration and catalyst on the rate of reaction. The reactions at the molecular level are not visible to human eyes and the use of…

Facilities are the foundation for safe and effective STEM teaching and learning, and the manner in which they are initially designed can either enhance or impede the quality of a program. This new focus on facilities in the U.S, and particularly in Texas, is needed to engage students in relevant and meaningful learning experiences that are aligned…

Portuguese schools hold important collections, most organised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This scientific heritage, however, is still to be discovered. This article focuses on the creation, development, and role of natural history collections in Portuguese secondary schools, between the second half of the nineteenth…