Here we evaluate undergraduate student attitudes about science after each of three authentic research experiences in a semester of an introductory biology laboratory course at Utah State University. The three course-based research experiences (CUREs) vary in length and student freedom, and they cover different areas of biology. Students responded…

The writing center is a common form of academic writing support in Canadian and U.S. universities (Moussu & David, 2015). With its nonproofreading policy, some scholars have indicated the service may be less effective for international students who require more explicit assistance on surface-level features in their academic writing (Harris…

In a university third-year instrumental chemistry laboratory students build a laser based polarimeter for determining light scattering with commercially available optical components used in modern optics research laboratories. During this laboratory experiment, students learn that solutions containing molecules which scatter light also influence…

The abstractness of certain chemistry concepts demands the use of appropriate teaching strategies to enable students to construct mental images of the concepts. The concepts include understanding the effects of concentration and catalyst on the rate of reaction. The reactions at the molecular level are not visible to human eyes and the use of…

Facilities are the foundation for safe and effective STEM teaching and learning, and the manner in which they are initially designed can either enhance or impede the quality of a program. This new focus on facilities in the U.S, and particularly in Texas, is needed to engage students in relevant and meaningful learning experiences that are aligned…

Portuguese schools hold important collections, most organised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This scientific heritage, however, is still to be discovered. This article focuses on the creation, development, and role of natural history collections in Portuguese secondary schools, between the second half of the nineteenth…

SenseCube is a multisensor capable of measuring many different real-time events and changes in environment. Most conventional sensors used in introductory-physics labs use their own software and have wires that must be attached to a computer or an alternate device to analyze the data. This makes the standard sensors time consuming, tedious, and…

The ability of certain organometallic reagents to react via 1,2- or 1,4-addition to an a,ß-unsaturated ketone is a fundamental example of regioselectivity at the second-year undergraduate organic level. The following two experiments were designed to demonstrate this preference by exploiting carvone as an inexpensive chiral, nonracemic substrate.…

International students represent a large portion of student populations at some higher education institutions in the United States. In response to the complexity of the student immigration process, more international students are choosing to pursue their US degrees online, while fulfilling their personal and professional obligations in their home…

This research aims to investigate the effect of guided inquiry laboratory activity with video embedded on students' understanding and students' motivation in learning lights and optics topic. The method used in this research was pre-experiment. The sampling technique used in this research was convenience sampling, and the samples were taken from…

Drawing on conversation analysis (CA), this study examines reported thought (e.g., "you're like 'do I really have to do that?'") and its function in writing center talk. Previous related studies, which are informed by Goffman's (1981) notion of footing, have demonstrated how reported thought (RT) is a resource for modeling undesirable…

Low cost, open-source analytical instrumentation has the potential to increase educational outcomes for students and enable large-scale citizen science projects. Many of these instruments rely on smartphones to collect the data, mainly because they can effectively leverage a dramatic price-to-performance ratio of the optical sensors. However,…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of cooperative learning and models on the conceptual understanding of the chemical reactions. The sample of study was comprised of 71 preservice science teachers from the first grade of science teacher education program. Quasi-experimental method with pre-and post-test of quantitative research was…

Histology is a visually oriented, foundational anatomical sciences subject in professional health curricula that has seen a dramatic reduction in educational contact hours and an increase in content migration to a digital platform. While the digital migration of histology laboratories has transformed histology education, few studies have shown the…

A simple synthesis of fluorescent carbon quantum dots from lemon juice is described to introduce advanced high-school students and undergraduate college students to nanoparticle synthesis and quantum dots. The synthesis is based on the carbonization of lemon juice using only a hot plate stirrer. Column chromatography is used to separate different…