Grades influence students' confidence and decisions to complete STEM degrees and pursue relevant careers. What affects students' confidence and performance in college upper-division biology laboratory courses and how relevant are evaluation methods to career success? STEM laboratory courses are an excellent model to address these issues because of…

Although considerable staff resources are often allocated to the teaching of undergraduate laboratory classes, there is a paucity of discussion regarding the extent and substance of the staff-student interactions that occur within classes and also whether these interactions benefit student learning in any way. Performed across four undergraduate…

Introductory physics lab courses serve as the starting point for students to learn and experience experimental physics at the undergraduate level. They often focus on measurement uncertainty, an essential topic for practicing physicists and a foundation for more advanced lab learning. As such, measurement uncertainty has been a focus when studying…

Contribution: This article provides evidence that perceived learning has a relationship and influences the way students evaluate laboratory experiments, facilities, and demonstrators. Background: Debate continues on the capability and/or reliability of students to evaluate teaching and/or learning. Understanding such relationships can help…

Laboratories, which are an integral part of education in disciplines that require hands-on training and application, can now be presented using new technologies, and application activities can be realized at a distance. In this study, virtual laboratories (VLs) are discussed, and factors affecting the students' intention to use VLs are…

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increasing amount of research on redesigning educational models. This paper describes the contents of a new laboratory course on physical chemistry based on blended learning, designed for third-year students in the Department of Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Chuo University. We provided…

An introductory plant science lab offered by the Department of Agronomy & Horticulture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was adapted for online delivery. This paper describes the adjustments made for online delivery and examines students' perceptions of learning and engagement from surveys administered in both the in-person and online…

Microscopy is not specifically mentioned in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and consequently secondary education limits its use to learning parts, procedures, and observing fixed specimen slides. However, when alternative approaches (See Section IV in this paper) are encouraged, microscopy provides opportunities for hands-on…

The real time PCR (qPCR) method provides a powerful method to assess levels of particular species of DNA. When combined with reverse transcription (RT-qPCR) it is the predominate technique to measure expression of gene transcripts. While this approach is very powerful, particular care must be taken in the design of the primers to facilitate…

A laboratory exercise was developed for the study of the effect of three cations (Al, Ca, and Na) on the flocculation and dispersion of soil particles. The exercise was designed for Soil Science undergraduate students in the second-course in the Agricultural Engineering and Environmental Sciences department at the University of Vigo. The students'…

To build knowledge, separate yet related learning episodes can be integrated with one another and then used to derive new knowledge. Separate episodes are often experienced through different formats, such as text passages and graphic representations. Accordingly, in the present research, we tested integration of learning episodes provided through…

Over the past two decades, chemistry education researchers shifted their focus toward what skills might be required in the twenty-first century chemical industry and to question whether the learning that occurs in traditional undergraduate teaching labs is sufficient for preparing the future workforce. For example, learning from failure and…

The purpose of this qualitative research project is to determine the type of labor secondary school writing center directors experience and the relationships between those types of labor. While there is research being conducted on labor, especially emotional labor in connection to self-care, in post-secondary writing centers, more research is…

The Faculty-in-Residence (FIR) initiative bridges resources of a regional university, its College of Education, and a K-8 partnership school in ways that enhance children's learning and well-being. A core commitment undergirding the FIR role is the recognition that blurred boundaries, collaborative relationships, and the reimagination of how…

In the United States with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)'s emphasis on learning science while doing science, laboratory activities in the secondary school chemistry continues to be an important component of a strong curriculum. Laboratory equipment and consumable materials create a unique expense which chemistry teachers and schools…