Organizational patterns can serve as a teaching strategy for instructors and as a learning tool for students to develop their expository writing skills, which are commonly required for assignments (for example, laboratory reports and research papers) in Food Science courses and in their future careers. The article discusses the importance of…

Purpose: This study aims to share experiences of an easy to adapt service-learning approach in a graduate course on life cycle assessment (LCA). Specifically, it reports on how students helped the university's cafeteria to assess meals by conducting an LCA for 25 meals and identifying environmental hotspots. Design/methodology/approach: A…

Framing, implementing, and engaging youth in authentic scientific inquiry are highly valued in science education; however, we have very limited knowledge of the nature and use of tools that accomplish these. Therefore, we proposed that board game design is a meaningful tool for engaging youth in understanding environmental issues. We reported…

This paper gives an example of how to address the challenge of designing a learning progression that describes student thinking, with the necessary specificity to align instructional opportunities and assessment tools. We describe the Conceptual Underpinnings of Evolution project and the iterative process of developing a novel learning progression…

Global warming and climate change are serious issues facing humanity at present and education needs to focus on including informed-decision in classroom practices. The conceptual framework used in this study has provided interconnections that influence beliefs and understandings in providing a knowledge base for making…

Inquiry learning pedagogies have not only been proposed as a successful teaching methodology to draw students into science, they are also rich with possibilities for creativity. The particular focus on investigations and problem-solving provides opportunity for educators to embrace this. The primary curriculum explicitly values creativity in this…

Aim/Purpose: This study serves a constructive purpose on the effective use of social media as a technical tool in formal learning at higher education. It outlines practical suggestions for institutions to leverage the participatory design method and refine social media pedagogies. Background: Social media gains widespread usage from the majority…

The purpose of this study was to explore grade eight students' views in terms of different scientific reasoning progress levels. To explore students' views, phenomenographic study was used. The qualitative analysis of students' interviews elicited three major themes of students' views about scientific reasoning progress levels: naïve, mixed, and…

The present study explored pre-primary students' investigative activity during a longitudinal, integrative technology education project: the Power Creatures project. Investigative activity refers to the way young children act in a learning context that combines inquiry-based activities with creative hands-on activities, such as designing and…

In this paper, we describe the evolution of calculus instruction at a mid-sized, career-oriented, comprehensive public university. Changes in practice, that began with a single faculty member implementing technology as a tool for student inquiry, have spread to other department faculty via support from an internal grant, workshops, and the use of…

There are many challenges associated with Inquiry-Based Practical Work (IBPW), scattered in the school and post-school natural sciences education research literature. The goal of the systematic review presented in this paper, was to gather the contextual teaching challenges in the said literature, and then to create a detailed multi-perspective…

Background: Efforts to promote reform-based instruction have overlooked the import of affect in teacher learning. Drawing on prior work, I argue that teachers' affective experiences in the discipline are integral to their learning how to teach the discipline. Moreover, I suggest that both affective and epistemological aspects of teachers'…

As students learn to problem solve in authentic situations, they must also develop metacognitive tools to manage and regulate their problem-solving process. To foster process-focused metacognition utilized by mathematical thinkers and problem solvers, inquiry-based learning classroom practices and an adapted version of portfolio problems were…

Many active, inquiry-based learning activities nowadays rely upon the students' capacity to perform efficient information research on the Internet. Study and Research Paths (SRPs) have been proposed to model inquiry learning, and successfully used as teaching formats in different areas. In an SRP the search for an answer to a generating question…

We investigated the impact of inquiry-based learning on the situational interest (SI) of senior high school students in a molecular biology class. In part I of our study we designed an inquiry-based learning class as an experimental workshop in an out-of-school student lab and compared it with the participants' regular biology class. The workshop…