Measuring plant stem growth over time is a simple activity commonly used to introduce concepts in growth and development in plant biology (Reid & Pu, 2007). This Quick Fix updates the activity and incorporates a real-world application: students consider possible effects of soil substrate and sunlight conditions on plant growth without needing…

Talking about death as part of a life cycle is often ignored or spoken about in hushed tones in early childhood. Books with "life cycle" in the title often do not include the death of the living organism in the information about the cycle. The concept of a complete life cycle does not appear in "A Framework for K-12 Science…

The ocean is home to some of Earth's most important producers. Single-celled organisms in the ocean are responsible for more than half of Earth's productivity, as well as most of its oxygen. Phytoplankton are single-celled, plantlike organisms. That is, they have chloroplasts and perform photosynthesis, but are not true plants, which are typically…

Understanding how situational features of assessment tasks impact reasoning is important for many educational pursuits, notably the selection of curricular examples to illustrate phenomena, the design of formative and summative assessment items, and determination of whether instruction has fostered the development of abstract schemas divorced from…

With the adoption of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) (CCSSI 2010), many concepts related to area are covered in third grade: (1) Recognizing area as an attribute of a plane figure; (2) Understanding that a square with a side length of one is a unit square; (3) Measuring area by tiling figures and counting the squares it…

Plants are an integral part of nature. Many plant species in almost any part of the world are under serious threats due to various reasons such as deforestation, pollution--of air, water and soil--caused by industrialisation, overgrazing and rapid population growth. It is likely that people have strong positive attitudes towards conservation of…

For more than 50,000 years of Papua New Guinea's human history, Papua New Guineans have been making significant contributions to Science, particularly in the fields of Chemistry and Medicine. However, because of the absence of any written language for over 800 dialects, the information has not been recorded and the contributions of ancient Papua…

This article looks at the potential of bioenergy as a replacement for fossil fuels, the cutting-edge research being undertaken by scientists, and classroom resources available for teaching this topic. There is currently a large programme of scientific research aiming to develop advanced biofuels (replenishable liquid biofuels from non-food plants,…

A research study investigated student perception of the use of metacognitive activities in the classroom. The courses were large enrollment (n greater than 100) introductory Plant and Soil Sciences courses taught in the fall semester. The courses implemented activities such as concept sketches or conceptual modeling to help students develop their…

Use of real specimens brings the study of biology to life. This activity brings easily acquired plant specimens into the classroom to tackle common alternative conceptions regarding life, size, complexity, the nature of science, and plants as multicellular organisms. The activity occurs after a discussion of the characteristics of life and engages…

We compared designs of guidance to support students while interacting with dynamic visualizations of complex scientific phenomena in inquiry instruction. Three hundred thirty-two 7th-grade students were randomly assigned to either a reading or a generating condition and completed a web-based inquiry unit focusing on energy concepts in…

An Interactive Dichotomous Key (IDK) for 390 "taxa" of vascular plants from the Ria de Aveiro, available on a website, was developed to help teach botany to school and universitary students. This multimedia tool includes several links to Descriptive and Illustrated Glossaries. Questionnaires answered by high-school and undergraduate students about…

This study examined 6th graders' use of the VoiceThread app as part of a science inquiry project on photosynthesis and carbon dioxide emissions in terms of their ability to engage in causal reasoning and their use of the affordances of multimodality, collaboration, interactivity, and connectivity. Students employed multimodal production using…

Guiding students to generate testable scientific questions is essential in the inquiry classroom, but it is not easy. The purpose of the BDC ("Big Idea, Divergent Thinking, and Convergent Thinking") instructional model is to to scaffold students' inquiry learning. We illustrate the use of this model with an example lesson, designed…

In this article, students examined how and why plants work through in-depth investigations. They performed scientific inquiry through questioning, developed models, constructed explanations, and communicated information of the structure and function and system models of plants, and then engineered a representation of their understanding. The…