Early in his paper, Radford discusses the origins of Western universities and argues that they were designed to provide a "very practical preparation for life and particularly for the professions, specifically law, medicine and theology." Radford then mentions how a core part of such education was grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic.…

This field experiment is designed to test for despotic behavior in Mallards ("Anas platyrhynchos"), and to examine how ducks distribute themselves relative to their resources. Students present Mallards with food patches differing in profitability in order to examine whether ducks distribute themselves ideal freely or ideal despotically. Students…

For more than a hundred years there has been a debate about the sequence in which high school science should be taught. Many advocates of "Physics First" support a more conceptual ninth-grade physics course followed by chemistry and then biology while supporters of mathematically rigorous physics favor a sequence of biology-chemistry-physics. This…

Although a well-corroborated scientific theory, the theory of evolution has continued to cause dilemmas for some individuals who have not easily been able to accommodate the concepts of this theory within their cognitive culture. The reason lies in the overlap of some ideas that the theory advocates with other social, epistemological, and…

The most effective teachers use a diversity of methods and approaches to assist their students in the learning process. Multiple technical resources (commonly referred to as multimedia) are currently used by many instructors to communicate difficult topics and concepts to their students in meaningful ways. The issue that arises is not only how to…

Integrating advanced biological techniques into instruction at non-R1 institutions can prove to be a challenge. Here, we report the creation of a model for the introduction of gene expression microarray technology into a research laboratory. A student assessment tool was used to evaluate: (1) technical skill development; (2) cross-disciplinary…

Educational action research was carried out between 2003 and 2006, focusing on developing high-school teachers' professional autonomy belonging to the scientific area in poor communes of the ninth Region de la Araucana, Chile. The research is contextualized in the Chilean educational reality and based on each of the stages of the action research…

Noncovalent interactions and physicochemical properties of amino acids are important topics in biochemistry courses. Here, we present a computational laboratory where the capacity of each of the 20 amino acids to maintain different noncovalent interactions are used to investigate the stabilizing forces in a set of proteins coming from organisms…

This article discusses the incorporation of biological content into existing calculus courses without significantly changing the courses. This is exemplified by the common laboratory course taken by students in all first semester calculus courses at Benedictine University. Several biologically oriented projects are implemented in this laboratory…

Previous research findings have suggested a relationship between less adaptive emotional functioning and fatigue. The present study used a research design involving multiple baselines across participants to evaluate the efficacy of a new emotion-focused treatment for prolonged fatigue delivered in a cognitive behavioral therapy framework. The 13…

Reading and writing stories with science-related themes make it possible for students to develop interest in and capacity for scientific thinking when specialist science and more popular genres converge. Additionally, feminist scholars have called for greater use of creative writing activities in school science to counter students' disengagement…

This study investigated the representations of a select group of scientists (n = 10) in a sample of Canadian high school and college textbooks. Drawing on semiotic and cultural-historical activity theoretical frameworks, we conducted two analyses. A coarse-grained, quantitative analysis of the prevalence and structure of these representations…

In this article, the author presents a field study project that explores factors influencing forest community structure and lifts the veil off of "plant blindness." This ecological study consists of three laboratories: (1) preliminary field trip to the study site; (2) plant survey; and (3) analyzing plant community structure with descriptive…

A study of the human's concept of time is presented. (CK)