"Science and Children" and "Science Scope" are peer-reviewed science practitioner journals that publish articles for science educators who teach children of ages 5-10 years and 10-13 years, respectively. As such, these articles are a reflection of the science concepts that are being communicated to science educators. This…

To keep biochemistry instruction current and relevant, it is crucial to expose students to cutting-edge scientific research and how experts reason about processes governed by thermodynamics and kinetics such as protein folding and dynamics. This study focuses on how experts explain their research into this topic with the intention of informing…

Evidence-based teaching practices are being encouraged to increase student skills and understanding in the sciences. Finding, interpreting, and applying education literature to a specific context are barriers to adopting these evidence-based practices. Here, we introduce a new feature, "Evidence-Based Teaching Guides." This feature…

A simple and reliable didactic laboratory has been developed to illustrate fundamental concepts of hydrophilicity, hydrophobicity, wetting, and spreading phenomena for undergraduate students. The described laboratory includes preparation of surfactant solutions at different concentrations and applying droplets of these solutions on a hydrophobic…

An assessment was developed using entries from the macromolecular Crystallographic Information File that was given to students in an upper level bioinformatics class at the end of the semester during a 2½ hour time period. Although all students completed the same questions, they were assessed on an individual protein they had worked on during the…

One STEAM (STEM + Arts) strategy is to supplement traditional STEM instruction with music. Using music could provide the dual benefits of (1) making STEM content more accessible and (2) enhancing students' engagement in the learning process. Here we explore the extent to which music-oriented high school students achieve these two benefits when…

Unlike the large number of laboratory experiments on phase-transfer catalysis (PTC) that focus on a catalyzed chemical process, the present laboratory emphasizes the mechanism of phase transfer catalysis itself. Students can follow visually the actual transfer of the reagent by the catalyst, and its consumption in the organic phase, in a…

Ensuring that all students, including English language learners (ELLs) who speak English as a second language, succeed in science is more challenging with a shift towards learning through language-intensive science practices suggested by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Interactive visualization technologies have the potential to…

We compute nodal centrality measures on the collaboration networks of students enrolled in three upper-division physics courses, usually taken sequentially, at the Colorado School of Mines. These are complex networks in which links between students indicate assistance with homework. The courses included in the study are intermediate classical…

Background: Cooperative and inquiry-based pedagogies provide a context for classroom discourse in which students develop joint understanding of subject matter knowledge. Using the symbolic interactionist perspective that meaning is constructed as individuals interact with one another, we examined how student groups enrolled in an undergraduate…

We report a case study of model-based reasoning in which a small group of fourth-grade students analyzes the energy flow when a solar panel is used to power an electric motor that spins a propeller. In developing their explanation of energy flow, the students draw on a general model of energy developed collectively by their class in the course of…

This article seeks to provide educators with strategies and activities that can be integrated within the 5E model (Bybee 1997) and demonstrate how argumentation can be assimilated into elementary classrooms to teach science concepts. In this lesson exemplar, 25 students in a first-grade English Language Development classroom (all of whom were…

Modern genetics is a relatively new domain, but it is increasingly important for students to have a firm grasp on the content, because genetic technologies are becoming more commonplace. In a previous study, we used the Learning Progression-based Assessment of Modern Genetics to assess high school students' knowledge of genetics concepts after an…

One of the central goals of modern science and chemistry education is to develop students' abilities to understand complex phenomena, and productively engage in explanation, justification, and argumentation. To accomplish this goal, we should better characterise the types of reasoning that we expect students to master in the different scientific…

The mathematical models that describe enzyme kinetics are invaluable predictive tools in numerous scientific fields. However, the daunting mathematical language used to describe kinetic behavior can be confusing for life science students; they often struggle to conceptualize and relate the mathematical representations to the molecular phenomena…