Instructional scaffolds may promote science learning, particularly for topics that are controversial. Scaffolding may also need to be autonomy supportive, particularly for adolescents, and designed to facilitate scientific discourse and agency. The purpose of the present study was to investigate differences in middle school students' discourse and…

Assessing scientific modeling competence (SMC) is challenging because of the multi-dimensionality of the construct and the potential variability of student performance across tasks. To deal with the challenges, this study applied Kane's validity framework to assess high-school students' SMC in Newtonian mechanics and examined how students'…

Vector cross product transformations are essential components in general physics. The numerous mnemonic devices catered towards each potential transformation result in confusion, defeating their purpose of reducing learning barriers. Therefore, a general mnemonic device, subject-environment interaction or the subject, is proposed to help students…

National science reform documents recommend several nature of science (NOS) elements to introduce to children early in the science curriculum. A researcher developed questionnaire was used to gather information from a random, national sample about early elementary teachers' perceptions of the developmental appropriateness of 12 NOS aspects for the…

Instructional resources play an important role in conducting high quality education. This research assessed the availability and utilization of instructional resources in Moro Local Government Area (LGA) of Kwara State, Nigeria. Descriptive survey research was adopted for the study. A total of sixty (60) Biology teachers were randomly sampled from…

Lab activities in primary and secondary education are essential to promote students' scientific skills. In this article, we propose a lab activity where different antimicrobial agents are used to the microorganisms' susceptibility to them. Moreover, we produce a rubric, a scoring tool, to quantify students' replies and evaluate the whole activity.…

As a representative catabolic reaction that widely exists in nature, anaerobic digestion (AD) exhibits great value regarding the global carbon cycle, renewable energy development, and environmental protection. Such an important biochemical reaction was ignored before and should be introduced into the teaching and textbooks of undergraduate…

The purpose of this case study was to investigate the perception and experience of ten new faculty member participants in paired teaching. Along with providing evidence for paired teaching as an avenue for professional development in higher education, the study provides experiential narratives of paired teaching relationships as an illustration of…

Like many other universities, Musical Acoustics is offered at our school as a lab-based course fulfilling general science requirements for non-majors. The course has been team-taught by a physics professor and music professor since its earliest inception and, by far, the most popular unit explores room acoustics through a variety of activities and…

Data from the Kepler satellite were analysed using the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes database. With the participation of 53 students, we determined the parameters of the HAT-P-7b (Kepler-2) exoplanet system (transit duration, planet-to-star radius ratio, orbital period, semi-major axis and star mass). We used approaches that are easy to…

In this work, a simple rocking pendulum, in a circular arc shape, is presented. The idea is to put a rigid arc on a clean flat surface of glass and leave it to oscillate under the effect of a little impulse. Then, the periodic time of this arc pendulum's motion is experimentally determined. The mathematical analysis of the arc's motion is derived…

Circular motion changes the perception of up and down. For a skater, the need to lean in towards the centre of an arc constitutes an embodiment of centripetal acceleration. This paper presents a discussion between a physicist and a high-school science teacher without previous physics studies at university level. The discussions started as part of…

The momentum is often used to analyse the dynamics of the motion of an experimental interaction between objects. Meanwhile, the interaction force tends to be challenging to observe and obtain. In this study, a simple video-assisted experiment was used to observe the interaction forces during the interaction of two magnetic objects. The interaction…

The purpose of this quantitative pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study was to examine the effect on student success rates in biology courses with laboratory components taken via distance education at a California community college. This study examined success rates for nine different courses, including 98 sections (2,299 students) taught only…

When deriving the equation describing the transverse motion of a one-dimensional vibrating elastic string, introductory physics textbooks often assume constant tension and/or small amplitude vibrations. However, these simplifying assumptions are not only unnecessary, but they overlook the elastic nature of the tension and yield an inconsistent…