Climate change is an increasingly pervasive global topic, but how much of this discussion is accurately understood by students? Fully comprehending the small fluctuations associated with long term changes in temperature and precipitation is a daunting task for the general public, let alone for middle-level adolescents. This study examines…

The purpose of the study was to examine how integrated science and disciplinary literacy instruction influenced the quality of science informational text produced by first-grade students and student perceptions these young children held about scientists. The disciplinary literacy instruction took place over the course of 8 weeks (three 20-30-min…

Time is a central concept for astronomy, yet how it is communicated in educational contexts has received insufficient attention in the literature. This study explores how time-related concepts are communicated in the planetarium, by analyzing 34 different planetarium sessions held in a diversity of Portuguese institutions. Sessions were video and…

Museums are used in every discipline to collect, classify, and present information for scientific purposes. They also serve as an effective educational medium. Since the establishment of a boutique anatomy museum at Bahçesehir University, lectures, conferences, and seminars have been organized there over the past four years on the history of human…

Interactive molecular dynamics in virtual reality (IMD-VR) simulations provide a digital molecular playground for students as an alternative or complement to traditional molecular modeling kits or 2D illustrations. Previous IMD-VR studies have used molecular mechanics to enable simulations of macromolecules such as proteins and nanostructures for…

A process for generating and writing an individual research proposal with or without access to advanced experimental techniques is described herein. This process was first included in a glycoconjugate biochemistry course to increase student interaction with more areas of the field, but the process was designed to be applicable elsewhere as well.…

The aldol condensation reaction is one of the many synthesis reactions carried out in second semester organic chemistry laboratories. This reaction was integrated into a novel experiment requiring students to synthesize dibenzalace tone derivatives using the crossed-aldol condensation by reacting different types of benzaldehyde derivatives with…

The use of Moodle quizzes as a continuous assessment and an integral part of the educational methodology in higher education has been analyzed in a case study of physical chemistry subject. Two types of quiz designed with different item types and different settings, called basic quiz (BQ) and thematic block quiz (TBQ), were elaborated making use…

Preparing elementary students to think and communicate like an engineer is possible, but requires a sequence of lessons spanning multiple classroom experiences that are aligned to multiple performance expectations (PEs). This article identifies how multiple PEs can be clustered to meet the instructional goals set forth in the "Next Generation…

Practice effects are ubiquitous human phenomena that have been scientifically studied for over half a century. They are also among the most directly applicable psychological phenomenon, holding broad implications for any domain involving human expertise, and especially for education. Yet the details of how practice works to improve performance are…

This paper reports the development and application of a low-cost multifunctional webcam spectrophotometer for the conduct of molecular absorption and fluorometric measurements. The equipment, which costs approximately US$20 to be fabricated, consists of a webcam, a diffraction grating, and a slit, all positioned inside an MDF box. Spectral…

Popular accounts of exciting discoveries often draw students to physics and astronomy, but at the introductory level it is challenging to connect with these in a meaningful way. The use of real astronomical data in the classroom can help bridge this gap and build valuable quantitative and scientific reasoning skills. This paper presents a strategy…

Due to its distinct phenotype and relatively simple inheritance pattern, the phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) loci is frequently utilized in teaching laboratories to demonstrate genetic concepts such as Mendelian inheritance and population genetics. We have developed a next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics approach to analyze the PTC gene locus…

This research draws on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to understand the epistemic dimension of the higher education classroom discourse of a professor who is well evaluated by his students. In expository science classroom discourse, concepts are loaded with different meanings, a process that is called "condensation of meanings" in LCT,…

This paper aims to examine the opinions of gifted children, their parents, and science teachers working at the Science and Art Centre (BILSEM) regarding science education for the gifted. The present study participants, which was conducted by utilizing the phenomenology design using one of the qualitative research methods, were ten talented…