Students come to class with diverse experiences and backgrounds, and the author tries to take advantage of that diversity in the plant unit. Every year the author secures the help of the two or three green thumbs or green-thumb wannabes to help take care of the collection of plants she brings from home in the fall. The author also invites students…

State and national standards have shifted what science learning should be from "plug and chug" formulas, to deep understanding of natural phenomena, competence developing ideas through the inquiry process, and even communicating scientific ideas among their communities (NRC 2007). By inquiring into his own teaching endeavors, the author continues…

The high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) experiment, most often done in the undergraduate analytical instrumentation laboratory course, generally illustrates reversed-phase chromatography using a commercial C[subscript]18 silica column. To avoid the expense of periodic column replacement and introduce a choice of columns with different…

A new approach to teaching method assessment using student focused qualitative studies and the theoretical framework of mental models is proposed. The methodology is considered specifically for the advantages it offers when applied to the assessment of inquiry-based teaching methods. The theoretical foundation of mental models is discussed, and…

This article presents a new instructional model called Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI) that can be used in undergraduate college chemistry laboratory courses. ADI is designed to provide students with an opportunity to develop their own method to generate data, to carry out investigations, use data to answer research questions, write, and be more…

Mathematics educators frequently extol the virtues of inquiry-based instruction to classroom teachers. Although research suggests that inquiry benefits learners by allowing them to make sense of the mathematics they encounter, particularly through discourse with peers, to assume that all (or even most) teachers successfully create and implement…

Following their participation in a guided-inquiry unit, 129 seventh-graders from five diverse urban middle schools were asked about their perceptions of specific inquiry tasks, from an expectancy-value framework. Students were asked to rate the interest value, utility value, and task difficulty of (a) data collection design; (b) explanation; (c)…

This paper reports on one preservice teacher's use of the Inquiry-Application Instructional Model (I-AIM) to plan and teach an instructional sequence on photosynthesis to 5th-grade students. Analysis of the preservice teacher's planned and enacted instructional sequences and interviews shows that the preservice teacher was successful in leveraging…

My experience of people's life stories from my work as a narrative therapist consistently destabilised distinctions between imagined/magical and real experiences. I came to realise that the day-to-day magical realist juxtapositions I came upon were encounters with people's daily lives, as lived, that have remained unacknowledged within the…

The notion of "science for all" suggests that all students--irrespective of achievement and ability--should engage in opportunities to understand the practice and discourse of science. Improving scientific literacy is an intrinsic goal of science education, yet current instructional practices may not effectively support all students, in…

This laboratory exercise is an inquiry-based investigation developed around the core experiment where students, working alone or in groups, each purify and analyze their own prescreened colored proteins using immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC). Here, we present reagents and protocols that allow 12 different proteins to be purified in…

Young people playing "Halo" or "World of Warcraft" might not realize it, but they are working on the prototypes for a future generation of student tests. The increasing popularity of video and computer games may cause concern among parents, who fear their children are spending too much time on them. However, educators and researchers increasingly…

The National Science Education Standards have outlined flexible processes children perform when engaging in scientific inquiry. Cases narratives are a common component of many university science education courses but rarely are they used as a tool to evaluate the preservice teachers within these courses. This article describes the construction of…

The culture of isolation in schools leaves many art educators feeling that they are, in a sense, islands. Working from the idea of an island, I use the geographic metaphor of an archipelago as a means to understand the tensions between isolation and collaboration related to professional development for art educators. In this article, I describe…

This essay addresses issues central to educational discourse in the United States by calling on texts and forms of inquiry generally unfamiliar and often unrecognized in current conversations regarding schooling and education, the Jewish tradition of Talmudic studies. Although Rabbis in this tradition never doubted the necessity of standards,…