In the past 20 years, science education in schools has increasingly been supported by extracurricular learning opportunities. From the point of view of pupils and teachers, student laboratories make meaningful contributions to complement the teaching of science. Studies have shown that participation in student laboratories has increased students'…

The purpose of this research was to design and develop hands-on practical physics activity for the determination of relationship between the fundamental frequency and wavelength of standing waves using open or closed resonance tubes. In this study, an innovative use of smartphone device for the hands-on practical activity was developed with the…

The present study describes the design of a simple teaching module for each student to fabricate a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) that could power a small fan motor. The significance of this laboratory exercise is to stimulate students' motivation by visualizing the light being converted into electricity, which is then switched over to kinetic…

Chemical safety management is an iterative process where reviews of safety deficiencies (e.g., inspection notes) and failures (e.g., injuries) guide improvement efforts. The present work investigates safety in the school chemistry laboratory through two substudies. First, we interviewed 10 Swedish middle and high school chemistry teachers about…

Many examples exist in the chemical education literature of individual experiments, whole courses or even entire year levels that have been completely renewed under the tenets of context-based, inquiry-based or problem-based learning. The benefits of these changes are well documented and include higher student engagement, broader skill development…

This paper summarizes my experience with teaching a first-year, General Chemistry course to a visually impaired student. This includes accommodations and modifications for both the lecture material and the laboratory. Included are also examples of formats and syntax for txt-based quizzes, tests, and laboratory reports, as well as other general…

This article focuses on learning gains in the area of higher education STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) through new approaches to the formative assessment feedback cycle. Learning gains were examined for stratified randomized comparison and two treatment groups of 943 students organized into 41 laboratory sections in…

Background: We present an analysis of students' responses to application-based questions on the topic of growth and control of microorganisms, from a questionnaire administered to 348 second and third year students of an Indian university who were enrolled in its undergraduate programs in Biotechnology or Microbiology. We examined aspects of the…

We present an educational approach to the phenomenon of phosphorescent emission. The approach is based on a stochastic toy model, in which electron states are represented by rows of squares on a cardboard table, and coins on the squares switch from one row to the other based on the roll of two dice. The discussion of different mechanisms, giving…

In their article, "Space, relations, and the learning of science," Wolff-Michael Roth and Pei-Ling Hsu draw our attention to the importance of field in the teaching and learning of science. While the Roth and Hsu study is focused on the scientific research laboratory as an internship setting for the teaching of science, this response to…

We have developed an upper-level undergraduate laboratory exercise that enables students to replicate a key experiment in developmental biology. In this exercise, students have the opportunity to observe live chick embryos and stain the apical ectodermal ridge, a key tissue required for development of the vertebrate limb. Impressively, every…

Pre-service teachers frequently express negative prejudices towards science and the methodologies traditionally used during their training. Gamification is a booming technology based on combining the psychological aspects, mechanics and dynamics of a game in non-ludic environments. The use of gamification has shown good outcomes in terms of…

In this article, we examine whether an inquiry-based, hands-on physics lab can be delivered effectively as a distance lab. In science and engineering, hands-on distance labs are rare and open-ended project labs in physics have not been reported in the literature. Our introductory physics lab at a large Canadian research university features…

A shortcoming of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is the lack of substantive integration of hands-on activities into online classrooms. We conducted a randomised control trial (RCT) in a MOOC where we sent the treatment group at-home lab kits with which they could perform experiments in their own homes. In our intervention research, we found…

At universities where introductory physics labs are taught by graduate student teaching assistants (TAs), there is a need for specialized professional development for those TAs. This paper presents a specific instantiation of a model for lab TA professional development that uses a combination of cognitive apprenticeship and expectancy-value…