To overcome students' inaccurate prior knowledge on primary additive colours, a coloured-light mixer has been constructed to enable students to observe directly the colours produced and reach the conclusion by themselves that the three primary colours of light are red, green, and blue (NOT red, yellow, and blue). Three closely packed tiny…

We have developed and implemented a summary field exercise for an introductory hydrogeology course without a laboratory section. This exercise builds on lectures and problem sets that use pre-existing field data. During one day in April, students measure hydraulic heads, stream and spring flow, and stream-bed seepage within the rural watershed of…

This article examines secondary students' design of experiments after engagement in an innovative and inquiry-oriented module on heat transfer. The module consists of an integration of hands-on experiments, simulated experiments and microscopic model simulations, includes a structured series of guided investigative tasks and was implemented for a…

Fox Hill Primary School is part of a family of schools in Sheffield that is piloting the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Primary Specialism for Science. In parallel to this work, Fox Hill participated in the Smarter Schools project from September 2008-2009. This project, funded by the AstraZeneca Science Teaching Trust, was set up by the…

In order to explore new teaching and learning methods for undergraduates in chemistry at the University of Warwick, interactive workshops based on the periodic table were devised by a team of chemists and theatre practitioners. In the first term of the academic year, students were assigned an element to research, and were required to submit…

This paper explores the reasons underlying access students' decisions on their study programmes as they progress through their extended science degree, including the role of career aspirations in these decisions. Data from semi-structured interviews with 20 third year undergraduates show two groups according to their decision criteria.…

This paper investigates the respective roles of substantive and procedural understanding with regard to students' ability to carry out an open-ended science investigation. The research is a case study centred on an intervention in which undergraduate initial teacher training students are taught the basic building blocks of procedural…

Working at scientists' elbows is one suggestion that educators make to improve science education, because such "authentic experiences" provide students with various types of science knowledge. However, there is an ongoing debate in the literature about the assumption that authentic science activities can enhance students' understandings…

This article is intended to model the ascent of the space shuttle for high school teachers and students. It provides a background for a sufficiently comprehensive description of the physics (kinematics and dynamics) of the March 16, 2009, "Discovery" launch. Our data are based on a comprehensive spreadsheet kindly sent to us by Bill Harwood, the…

Our favorite demonstration for sound waves is to set up a compressional pulse on a horizontally stretched Slinky[TM]. One can easily watch the pulse move back and forth at a speed of the order of one meter per second. Watching this demonstration, it occurred to us that the same thing might happen in a steel pipe if you hit the end of the pipe with…

We have found that a simple demonstration experiment using a match or a cotton swab and a drinking straw or an acrylic pipe serves as an effective introduction to dynamics. The most basic apparatus has a cotton swab serving as a dart and the straw as the blowgun. When blown from a starting point near the exit end of the straw, the cotton swab does…

The Sun's gravitational influence is of course much greater than that of any of the planets. Just how much greater can be dramatically illustrated by plotting their combined gravitational potential on the same graph.

When ice sheets melt, and reduce the load on the surface of the Earth, the land areas beneath them bounce back up. New, accurate observations are needed to investigate this uplift and its implications effectively. This article provides a topical starting point for investigating some applications of physics applied to the polar regions of the…

In this demonstration, the students use their knowledge of electrochemistry to determine that tarnish can be removed from silverware by electrochemically converting it back to silver using items commonly available in the kitchen: aluminum foil and baking soda. In addition to using this system as an example of a galvanic cell, an electrolytic cell…

I will propose here an alternative method for determining atomic radii of alkali metals based on the Hall measurements of their free electron densities and the knowledge of their crystal structure. (Contains 2 figures.)