Despite its popularity in education studies literature, interdisciplinary science education is mostly considered outside the multitude of social forces that drive education reform. This has contributed to a mythologizing of interdisciplinary science education and lead to assumptions about the necessity of its intervention into science education…

A multi-instrument approach has been applied to the efficient identification of polymers in an upper-division undergraduate instrumental analysis laboratory course. Attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) is used in conjunction with differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) to identify 18 polymer samples and…

The design and fabrication of functional scientific instrumentation allows students to forge a link between commonly reported numbers and physical material properties. Here, a two-point and four-point probe station for measuring electrical properties of solid materials is fabricated via 3D printing utilizing an inexpensive benchtop…

Natural selection is a central concept throughout biology; however, it is a process frequently misunderstood. Bacterial resistance to antibiotic medications provides a contextual example of the relevance of evolutionary theory and is also commonly misunderstood. While research has shed light on student misconceptions of natural selection, minimal…

Introducing new physics phenomena through inquiry labs has been a staple of the successful physics teacher for years. Introducing new vocabulary through lab work, however, is less common. This paper offers an example of a simple and short lab that does just that, and one that I have found to be quite useful in my college prep physics courses to…

The year 2014 marked the four-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Galileo's birth, making it the perfect occasion to present and illustrate a GeoGebra applet which reproduces some of Galileo's celebrated experiments on the uniformly accelerated motion, as reported on in "Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New…

Using a conventional notation for representing forces on diagrams, students were presented with questions on the interaction between two objects. The results show that complete understanding of Newton's Third Law of Motion is quite rare, and that some problems relate to misunderstanding which force acts on each body. The use of the terms…

Many researches on the correlation between metacognitive skills and concept gaining have been widely carried out based on a particular learning model. It was uncovered that there was a significant positive correlation between metacognitive skills and concept gaining. Is it always so, related to one or several learning models? This survey study is…

As the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English language arts (ELA)/literacy and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) highlight connections across subject areas, convergences and discrepancies come into view. As a prominent example, this article focuses on how the CCSS and the NGSS treat "argument," especially in Grades…

The concepts of electricity and magnetism in physics are complex and demanding to learn because their meaning builds through several different phenomenological areas. Each of the phenomenological areas adds a certain facet of the meaning of the concept. All standard physics textbooks discuss at least 1) force, 2) energy and work, and 3) electric…

The goal of this paper is to introduce an explicit protocol that preservice science teachers can use to improve the quality of the scaffolding (written and oral prompts) of their inquiry lessons. Scaffolding is an essential component of effective inquiry lessons because it keeps students focused on the target science content and divides the…

To foster the connection between biochemistry and the supporting prerequisite concepts, a collection of activities that explicitly link general and organic chemistry concepts to biochemistry ideas was written and either assigned as pre-class work or as recitation activities. We assessed student learning gains after using these activities alone, or…

Students get to Elementary School with a series of misconceptions which are not necessarily in agreement with the scientific knowledge. Misconceptions result from the student's attempts to understand their previous experiences resulting from their interaction with their environment and they must be taken into account in educational practice to…

In this work, we present a pedagogical strategy to describe the diffraction phenomenon based on a didactic adaptation of the Feynman's path integrals method, which uses only high school mathematics. The advantage of our approach is that it allows to describe the diffraction in a fully quantum context, where superposition and probabilistic aspects…

The purpose of this study is to explore community college students' reasoning patterns and argumentation within the context of natural selection. Written assessments and interviews were administered to 2-year college students. Participants were given the Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Argumentation (LCTSR), a Test of Scientific Argumentation…