Diffusion and osmosis are central concepts in biology, both at the cellular and organ levels. They are presented several times throughout most introductory biology textbooks (e.g., Freeman, 2002), yet both processes are often difficult for students to understand (Odom, 1995; Zuckerman, 1994; Sanger "et al.", 2001; and results herein). Students…

Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) combines the best features of traditional in-class instruction with the communication potential available via the Web. We describe here how JiTT has been used in Biology Education and how it can be used in Food Science Education. JiTT uses Web-based "Warm Up" assignments due before class to stimulate critical thinking…

What people mean by randomness should be taken into account when teaching statistical inference. This experiment explored subjective beliefs about randomness and probability through two successive tasks. Subjects were asked to categorize 16 familiar items: 8 real items from everyday life experiences, and 8 stochastic items involving a repeatable…

The candle burning experiment is usually conducted in lower secondary classes to prove the (about) 20% oxygen in air. The aim of this paper is to show that teachers misinterpret the results of the experiment to satisfy the objectives of teaching this experiment. However, when the results of this experiment are interpreted correctly, the objectives…

If there was one theme essential to the historical scholarship of Stanford professor Susan Moller Okin, it was the oppression of females. In imbuing political theory with feminism, Okin wrote, for instance, that modern American women are "second-class" citizens in a society where biological differences should count for nothing. Such declarations…

This paper reports on an investigation into first year students' perceptions of IT as a career. There are many stereotypes of the typical IT professional. These stereotypes are often depicted in the media and affect students' perceptions of the career and whether they should study IT or not. An exploratory study into male and female first year…

This paper examines the problem of delivering a body of knowledge based on biomedical research as a school physical education discourse. The paper attempts to deconstruct the ideology of healthism upon which the discourse is based in order to show how ascetic practices in school physical education are promoted as a way of combating the hedonistic…

Despite the best attempts of academic staff to teach students the mechanics of citation, the rules of referencing continue to be broken, particularly by those new to Western university systems (either first-year undergraduate students or international students from different cultural backgrounds). In late 2003, 16 postgraduate international…

We report the development of an assessment instrument that provides a profile of the attainment and the errors of pre-service primary teachers across the mathematics curriculum. We describe test development, analyses and test validation involving a sample of 426 pre-service teachers in the first year of their training in primary education courses…

Unquestionably, rural schools face many obstacles in their attempts to attract teachers. However, a survey of preservice teachers working in rural districts found that many of these obstacles stem from misconceptions or a lack of knowledge about what it means to live and work in a rural area. Perception, however, is reality and therefore deserves…

In Singapore, special education has traditionally been perceived as distinct from general education. Students with learning and behavioral difficulties in general education classrooms are often neglected. Typically, this is due to the fact that many general education teachers lack the competencies required to work with students with diverse…

Enzyme kinetics is a difficult subject for students to learn and for tutors to teach. During the practicals included in the biochemical courses at the Faculty of Chemistry of Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, we found that the students acquire good training in the calculations to obtain kinetic parameters such as K[subscript m], V[subscript…

The undermining effect of extrinsic reward on intrinsic motivation remains unproven. The key unresolved issues are construct invalidity (all four definitions are unproved and two are illogical); measurement unreliability (the free-choice measure requires unreliable, subjective judgments to infer intrinsic motivation); inadequate experimental…

Plato wrote that higher order thinking could not start until the student had mastered conventional wisdom. The American educational establishment has turned Plato on his head with the help of a dubious approach to teaching developed by one Benjamin Bloom. Bloom's taxonomy was intended for higher education, but its misappropriation has resulted in…

Researchers suggest that children of minority groups are so confused by the customs of the dominant culture represented in schools that their English literacy learning suffers. An ethnographic study examined the literacy learning of two language minority children in a suburban kindergarten program. Using unstructured interviews, the focal…