Experienced teachers possess a unique teaching knowledge comprised of an inter-related set of knowledge and beliefs that gives direction and justification to a teacher's actions. This study examined the expansion of two components of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of three in-service teachers in the course of a professional development…

Many innovative teaching approaches lack classroom impact because teachers consider the proposals impractical. Making a teaching approach practical requires instrumentality (procedures), congruence (local fit), and affordable cost (limited time and resources).This paper concerns a study on the development and effects of a participatory design…

This laboratory exercise demonstrates the use of an immunoassay for studying kinase enzyme activity in living cells. The advantage over the classical method, in which students have to isolate the enzyme from cell material and measure its activity in vitro, is that enzyme activity is modulated and measured in living cells, providing a more…

It is important to understand the many controversies about cognitive sex differences because beliefs about these differences are often used to justify pubic policies and individual actions. As teachers of psychology, we need to provide a safe environment where students can think and argue about why, how, and how much females and males are similar…

In 1973, the Institute of Environmental Stress of the University of California-Santa Barbara, under the direction of Steven M. Horvath, began a series of field and laboratory studies of marathon runners during competition. As one of Horvath's graduate students, many of these studies became part of my doctoral dissertation. The rationale for…

This paper demonstrates that an informal field trip can have a lasting impact upon aspects of learning in a primary school context. Specifically, we consider the longer term impact of an informal trip to a rocky shore upon scores achieved in literacy assessments taking place five months after a relevant five months after a fieldwork. Pupils…

The increasing availability of concept inventories and other assessment tools in the molecular life sciences provides instructors with myriad avenues to probe student understanding. For example, although molecular visualization is central to the study of biochemistry, a growing body of evidence suggests that students have substantial limitations…

Many single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been identified within the "Caenorhabditis elegans" genome. SNPs present in the genomes of two isogenic "C. elegans" strains have been routinely used as a tool in forward genetics to map a mutation to a particular chromosome. This article describes a laboratory exercise in which…

A case study is described that examines the beliefs and practices of a university instructor who teaches regularly in an active learning classroom. His perspective provides insights into the pedagogical practices that drive his success in these learning spaces.

The Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences Network (CUREnet) was initiated in 2012 with funding from the National Science Foundation program for Research Coordination Networks in Undergraduate Biology Education. CUREnet aims to address topics, problems, and opportunities inherent to integrating research experiences into undergraduate…

This paper aims at exploring (a) whether preschoolers recognize that offspring share physical traits with their parents due to birth and behavioural ones due to nurture, and (b) whether they seem ready to explain shared physical traits with a "pre-biological" causal model that includes the contribution of both parents and a rudimentary…

Teaching about energy in interdisciplinary settings that emphasize coherence among physics, chemistry, and biology leads to a more central role for chemical bond energy. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to chemical energy leads to modeling chemical bonds in terms of negative energy. While recent work on ontological metaphors for energy…

One of the most intriguing results concerning chronopsychological effects at school is the worse school performance in evening-oriented adolescents. The study intends to correlate affective state with chronotype. Therefore, we carried out a field study in adolescents in a natural setting (in school) and assessed their actual affective state during…

When teaching physics, it is often difficult to get biology-oriented students to see the relevance of physics. A complaint often heard is that biology students are required to take physics for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) as part of a "weeding out" process, but that they don't feel like they need physics for biology. Despite…

Epigenetics is the study of how external factors and internal cellular signals can lead to changes in the packaging and processing of DNA sequences, thereby altering the expression of genes and traits. Exploring the epigenome introduces students to environmental influences on our genes and the complexities of gene expression. A supplemental…