Forty-seven states have adopted a pathway to teaching, alternative to the standard state certification otherwise required. But is alternative certification impairing student learning? That is ultimately the justification for traditional teacher certification. To see which states have established genuine alternative certification programs and which…

Teaching "scientific method" has long been a regular part of science education, and many curriculum standards call for it. But it has run into a variety of criticisms, which add up to the charge that it conveys an unrealistic and unappealing view of science. In this article, the authors discuss how science really works and provide different ways…

Improvements in performance on many perceptual skills can occur with only a single training session. Of interest here is what aspects of the training experience are being learned during this brief exposure. Although there is considerable evidence that learning associated with specific feature values of the stimulus used in training ("stimulus…

Two experiments examined how Dutch listeners deal with the effects of connected-speech processes, specifically those arising from word-final /t/ reduction (e.g., whether Dutch [tas] is "tas," bag, or a reduced-/t/ version of "tast," touch). Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays containing 4…

The purpose of the study was to examine the role of domain knowledge when retrieving and using information from the Internet as a resource for essay tasks, as well as to investigate the quality of Internet searches and its relation to essay performance. In two experiments, 100 undergraduates searched the Internet for 30 min and completed two…

In this paper we analyse the behaviour of a small-scale model of a magnetic levitation system based on the Inductrack concept. Drag and lift forces acting on our prototype, moving above a continuous copper track, are studied analytically following a simple low-speed approach. The experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical…

We apply several physical ideas to determine the steady temperature distribution in a medium moving with uniform velocity between two infinite parallel plates. We compute it in the coordinate frame moving with the medium by integration over the "past" to account for the influence of an infinite set of instantaneous point sources of heat in past…

We study the turning point problem of a spherical pendulum. The special cases of the simple pendulum and the conical pendulum are noted. For simple initial conditions the solution to this problem involves the golden ratio, also called the golden section, or the golden number. This number often appears in mathematics where you least expect it. To…

Efficient glow-in-the-dark materials are usually difficult to synthesize and need complex experiments with long reaction times that are not appropriate for conventional lab teaching. Therefore, we describe a new experimental procedure that allows the production of one of the most efficient "glow-in-the-dark" materials (SrAl[subscript 2]O[subscript…

Self-explaining, which asks students to generate explanations while reading a text, is a self-constructive activity and is helpful for students' learning. Studies have revealed that prompts by a human tutor promote students' self-explanations. However, most studies on self-explaining focus on spoken self-explanations. This study investigates the…

A total of 82 Chinese 11- and 12-year-olds with and without dyslexia were tested on four paired associate learning (PAL) tasks, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, rapid naming, and verbal short-term memory in three different experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that children with dyslexia were significantly poorer in visual-verbal…

While looking for labs for his pre-engineering class, the author came across an idea for a marine engineering project from the Future Scientists and Engineers of America website. The author thought the lab looked fun, and it was not too expensive. These were two important criteria as he chose labs for the class. Another important criteria he had…

Haloperoxidase enzymes are of interest for basic and applied bioscientists because of their increasing importance in pharmaceutical industry and environmental cleanups. In a guided inquiry-based laboratory experiment for life-science, agricultural science, and health science undergraduates, the bromoperoxidase from a red seaweed was used to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explain the changes in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 compared with WCAG 1.0 within the context of its historical development. Design/methodology/approach: In order to compare WCAG 2.0 with WCAG 1.0 a diachronic analysis of the evolution of these standards is done. Known authors and…

Reports on apparatus for generating Lissajous figures, projecting Poisson's spots, photographing diffraction patterns, electric heating, and projecting moving longitudinal waves on an oscilloscope. (SL)