Prior literature has documented the importance of faculty advisors in the doctoral student socialization process, with a few studies describing negative advising relationships characterized by disengagement, disinterest, unsupportive behavior, and interpersonal conflict. We extend this research by exploring how negative advising relationships…

A number of familiarization trials are needed for reliable measurement, particularly for inexperienced subjects. Researchers have studied and developed familiarization protocols that vary by exercise and study population. The pace of familiarization and fatigue may be an individual-level characteristic, so a population-level protocol may not fit…

Field trips provide real-world learning opportunities in biology education as they promote knowledge about nature among other things. As biodiversity is declining knowledge of species is important for understanding and appreciating the natural world and its implications. Many field guides are digitally available, but differences from traditional…

Purpose: While ample literature describes students' experiences during graduate school, fewer studies examine how doctoral students transition into full-time employment post degree completion. The purpose of this study is to examine how faculty advisors, as well as other individuals, shape students' experiences during a critical period in their…

Do children think of genetic inheritance as deterministic or probabilistic? In two novel tasks, children viewed the eye colors of animal parents and judged and selected possible phenotypes of offspring. Across three studies (N = 353, 162 girls, 172 boys, 2 non-binary; 17 did not report gender) with predominantly White U.S. participants collected…

This study aims to determine those topics and concepts that biology and science teacher candidates find most challenging to learn in biology lessons. A qualitative case study research method was used to this end. A total of 132 science and biology teacher candidates studying at a state university were asked to write down the ten subjects or…

Core chemistry ideas can be useful tools for explaining biological phenomena, but students often have difficulty understanding these core ideas within general chemistry. Connecting these ideas to biologically relevant situations is even more difficult. These difficulties arise, in part, from a lack of explicit opportunities in relevant courses for…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how graduate students describe self-care deficits and to understand how self-care deficits contribute to burnout, exhaustion, and stress at a private university in the Southeast. During semi-structured interviews and post-interview reflections, ten graduate students from private…

Aim: We investigated the dose--response relationship between acute physical activity (PA) intensity during physical education (PE) lessons (dose), and task behaviour and learning experiences in the classroom after PE (response), and mediation effects of acute PA on-task behaviour via learning experiences. Method: A total of 78 children…

Transcription is the critical first step in expressing a gene, during which an RNA polymerase (RNAP) synthesizes an RNA copy of one strand of the DNA that encodes a gene. Here we describe a laboratory experiment that uses a single assay to probe two important steps in transcription: (1) RNAP binding to DNA, and (2) the transcriptional activity of…

Learning goals and objectives are a key part of instruction, informing curricular design, assessment, and learning. These goals and objectives are also applied at the programmatic level, with program learning outcomes (PLOs) providing insight into the skills that undergraduate biology programs intend for their students to master. PLOs are mandated…

Even though genetics has been implemented in biology curricula at secondary schools for decades, reports repeatedly indicate that students still hold various misconceptions about this topic. To successfully target these misconceptions, we need to know their nature and origin. We aimed to investigate these properties in the Czech educational system…

When the pandemic forced college instruction online, most faculty focused on converting their courses to a new format, but increasingly stressed students began to turn to faculty for both personal and academic support. Faculty who trained as subject matter experts found themselves experiencing the symptoms of burnout and compassion fatigue,…

Active-learning pedagogies often require group work. We tested aspects of forming groups in a nonmajors Biology class. We asked whether large or small groups affected student learning outcomes and attitudes towards working in groups. We placed students in groups of three or six and students stayed in their groups for the term. We measured learning…

This quantitative, descriptive, nonexperimental study employed Maslach's Burnout Inventory (MBI) to investigate the issue of principal turnover within high-poverty schools in Texas. The research question for this study is, "Is there a difference in a principal's feelings of burnout based on their years of experience?" The researcher used…