Little is known about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on special education teachers. Of 468 surveyed across the United States, 38.4% met clinical criteria for generalized anxiety disorder, a rate 12.4 times greater than the U.S. population, and 37.6% for major depressive disorder, a rate 5.6 times greater than the population. Race/ethnicity,…

Responsive teaching is an approach to instruction that foregrounds listening for, attending to and engaging with student disciplinary thinking and ideas in the classroom. This style of teaching differs from how many traditional STEM classes are taught, especially at the college level. Entry-level college science courses that are taught by graduate…

Mental health challenges have been rising across college campuses. To destigmatize wellness practices and promote student mental health, we present a novel technical project in an introductory bioengineering course that explores stress management techniques through physiology, biosensors, and design. We hypothesize that if students measure…

The critical thinking skills are needed by biology teacher candidates to deal with the nowadays ethical issues arisen among society. The aim of this research was to observe the critical thinking skills of biology teacher candidates toward the ethical issues especially in genetic field through online discussion. The subjects of this experimental…

Questioning skills is one of competencies required by teachers in dealing with the 21st-Century challenges. The purpose of this study was profiling biology teacher candidates' questioning skills in Pekanbaru. The subjects of the research were the students, in three institutions, who were taking Zoology course. The total number of the subjects were…

We provide a protocol for rapid DNA extraction from spiders suitable for undergraduate practical sessions. Students who were previously naïve to the theory and laboratory technique of DNA barcoding were successfully able to extract and recover 29 DNA sequences from 16 species of small spiders in the family Linyphiidae. We anticipate that with…

The aim of this study is to analyse the science questions in terms of visual content in the higher education entrance exams in Turkey. In this context, 1714 questions in total prepared by the Center for Measurement, Selection and Placement (CMSP) between 1999 and 2019 in the fields of Physics (n=631), Chemistry (n=553) and Biology (n=530)…

Using the comparative approach, researchers draw inferences about the evolution of cognition. Psychologists have postulated several hypotheses to explain why certain species are cognitively more flexible than others, and these hypotheses assume that certain cognitive skills are linked together to create a generally "smart" species.…

The field of epigenetics is progressing rapidly and becoming indispensable to the study of fundamental gene regulation. Recent advances are redefining our understanding of core components that regulate gene expression during development and in human diseases. Scientific knowledge on the importance of epigenetic regulation is now well known and…

This article illustrates the use of Microsoft OneNote as an Electronic Notebook for undergraduate biochemistry lab reports as well as student opinions of this use both before and during the online coursework shift during the pandemic.

Nonideal enrollment of nonbiology majors into biology majors courses serves as an impediment to academic success and negatively impacts rates of college course completion. In this Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved investigation, we examine student success, as measured by student grades and course completion rates, for nonbiology majors who…

The idea of the interaction between genes and environment in the formation of traits is an important component of genetic literacy, because it explains the plastic nature of phenotypes. However, most studies in genetics education characterize challenges in understanding and reasoning about genetic phenomena that do not involve modulation by the…

Boosting students' disciplinary interest has long been considered an important mechanism to increase student success and retention in STEM education. Yet, interest is a complex construct and can mean different things to different people, and many of the existing interest questionnaires do not identify a specific theoretical framework underlying…

Over the last few decades, there has been a shift in the classroom from lecture-based to active learning settings with the argument that students retain more information when they are involved in the learning process. This correlation is even stronger when the active learning setting incorporates a real-world or personal connection. Using active…

Lab courses are a significant component of biochemistry and molecular biology (BMB) education. In teaching the labs, we combine established techniques with novel approaches. Lab formats have also moved from traditional cookbook style labs to guided inquiry to course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), where faculty bring their own…