Most laboratory activities conducted by students involve measurement, and measurement can only be as precise as the instrument with which it is made. When Julia Metz began her teaching career, she assumed most of the 10th grade chemistry students would have previously used common measuring devices such as metric rulers, graduated cylinders,…

In recent years, researchers have shown an interest in understanding students' own ideas about basic chemical principles and guiding them through innovative ways to gain conceptual understanding where necessary. This research was a case study designed to assess 50 first year high school students' conceptual understanding about changes in matter,…

The credibility of conclusions made about the effectiveness of educational interventions depends greatly on the quality of the assessments used to measure learning gains. This essay, intended for faculty involved in small-scale projects, courses, or educational research, provides a step-by-step guide to the process of developing, scoring, and…

Spectrophotometry and colorimetry experiments are common in high school and college chemistry courses, and nanotechnology is increasingly common in every day products and new devices. Previous work has demonstrated that handheld camera devices can be used to quantify the concentration of a colored analyte in solution in place of traditional…

A laboratory exercise was devised that allows students to rapidly and fairly accurately determine the iodine value of oleic acid. This method utilizes the addition of elemental bromine to the unsaturated bonds in oleic acid, due to bromine's relatively fast reaction rate compared to that of the traditional Wijs solution method. This method also…

Chaos theory is not present in the Italian school curricula and textbooks in spite of being present in many topics of classical physics and in everyday life. Chaotic dynamics, in fact, are involved in phenomena easily accessible to everyone or in events experienced by most people in their lives (the dripping of a faucet which keeps people awoken…

There are strong classroom ties between mathematics and the sciences of physics and chemistry, but those ties seem weaker between mathematics and biology. Practicing biologists realize both that there are interesting mathematics problems in biology, and that viewing classroom biology in the context of another discipline could support students'…

The reaction process of copper-aluminum displacement in agar gel was observed at the microscopic level with a stereomicroscope; pine-like branches of copper crystals growing from aluminum surface into gel at a constant rate were observed. Students were asked to make hypotheses on the pattern formation and design new research approaches to prove…

The South African secondary school curriculum emphasises the importance of science process skills in its respective natural sciences curricula. The purpose of this study was to explore the views of student teachers with regard to the importance they attach to these skills. A 14-item questionnaire was administered to 75 third- and fourth-year…

For years, education research and policy efforts have addressed the importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in the United States. Much of this research fails to characterize the relational aspects involved despite widespread theoretical support for such an emphasis. In this paper, we report findings from a…

Botany is traditionally viewed as less attractive than zoology for students, despite the fact that plants play a key role in natural ecosystems. It is hypothesized that survival-relevant information may enhance learner's attention and that this information might be better remembered than others. Additionally, the use of the PowerPoint (PPT)…

The ecological footprint concept is important in order to evaluate the human impact on the environment and propose sustainable solutions in our life. By calculating ecological footprint, people could analyze the impact of their lifestyle on the natural environment. The purpose of this study is to share an ecological footprint education module for…

The authors' aim was to determine the extent to which error detection contributes to the explanation of a cognitive and motivational model of student performance in an assessment test. A total of 151 science students of secondary education participated in the investigation. Two causal models were developed using a structural equation analysis.…

This paper aims to analyze the differences between internet facilities, internet usage purposes, internet self-efficacy (ISE), and internet perceptions in learning physics, regarding students' gender and grade. A total of 798 senior high school students were surveyed randomly from 10 schools in the urban area of Lampung Province, Indonesia. The…

The generation of secondary colors in digital devices by means of the additive red, green, and blue color model (RGB) can be a valuable way to introduce students to the basics of spectroscopy. This work has been focused on the spectral separation of secondary colors of light emitted by a computer screen into red, green, and blue bands, and how the…