Science educators agree that an undergraduate research experience is critical for students who are considering graduate school or research careers. The process of researching a topic in the primary literature, designing experiments, implementing those experiments, and analyzing the results is essential in developing the analytical skills necessary…

One aim of physics laboratory instruction is to help students connect theory to practice. So experiments are often chosen in order to "demonstrate" specific concepts. Furthermore, students are expected to approach phenomena in a scientific way, that is, they should develop a hypothesis and plan their experiments accordingly. Although it is usually…

Physics labwork has for a long time now been an important part of academic physics education. But demands on physics education have changed. However, while seminars and lectures have easily been updated with the latest content, it is much more difficult to modernize labwork courses: mere changes of content require expensive new equipment, tight…

Physics as a subsidiary subject has to match very different objectives and to cope with a variety of students' learning conditions. Targeted labwork means that a careful choice among these objectives is made according to research outcomes. For medical students, a targeted labwork course in physics was developed. Essentially, the development was…

The aim of the study was to examine do health care students, who study at different programs, value similar expert qualities. To investigate this issue, a questionnaire was administered among health care students in a Finnish polytechnic (two cohorts, total n = 466), consisting of a scale for rating the importance of different expert qualities.…

A model for processes of abstraction, based on epistemic actions, has been proposed elsewhere. Here we apply this model to processes in which groups of individual students construct shared knowledge and consolidate it. The data emphasizes the interactive flow of knowledge from one student to the others in the group, until they reach a shared…

Manufacturing engineering provides a relevant context from which to envision interdisciplinary learning experiences because engineers integrate their knowledge and skills of manufacturing and algebra processes in order to plan the efficient manufacture of products. In this article, the author describes an interdisciplinary learning activity that…

We describe our pedagogical approaches and experiences with an academic club service learning project (one semester, 20 club participants, including both graduate students and lower and upper-level undergraduates). Our service learning project responds to the recent demand for more community service-based club projects within the College of…

Laboratory and demonstration have long been used to supplement lecture in chemistry education. Current research indicates that students are better served by laboratories which exercise the higher-order cognitive skills, such as inquiry-based laboratories. However, the time and the resources available to perform these recommended types of…

This paper focuses on the different ways in which students in lower secondary school (14-16 year olds) experience compound random events, presented to them in the form of combined junctions. A carefully designed ICT environment was developed enabling the students to interact with different representations of such structures. Data for the analysis…

Each of these outstanding selections defies the traditional image of a child "curling up with a good book." Yes, they can be a source of great personal reading, encouraging students of all ages to stretch their skills and their imagination as they interact with the printed page. But these journeys of the scientific imagination seldom end with the…

This article describes the outgrowth of a recently held invitational conference, supported by the National Science Foundation, to define, describe, and examine existing models for the use of elementary science specialists. The authors explore the educational, policy, and financial issues that affect the use of science specialists as well as offer…

This article describes a two-semester general chemistry laboratory teaching approach to assist students in gaining experience with science-process skills. The ultimate goal is successful completion of a second-semester service-learning project requiring use of their newly developed science-process skills. The project entails creating an…

Elementary school children in the United States are not developing acceptable levels of mathematical proficiency (National Center for Education Statistics, 1999), and a major concern of teacher educators is that teachers lack the depth and flexibility of mathematical understanding and the corresponding beliefs they need to teach for proficiency…

Background: The study investigated a small range of cognitive abilities, related to visual-spatial intelligence, in adolescents. This specific range of cognitive abilities was termed "graphic abilities" and defined as a range of abilities to visualise and think in three dimensions, originating in the domain of visual-spatial…