Incorporation of experimental case studies into the laboratory curriculum increases students’ abilities to identify experimental variables that affect the outcome of an experiment. Here the authors describe how such case studies were incorporated using an online course management system into a biochemistry laboratory curriculum and the assessment methods used to document increased student learning.
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This article describes the development of the Inquiry Institute, a collaboration of scientists from a science department and science educators from a school of education. The history of the institute and the benefits to students, faculty, and the institution are presented. The institute is responsibility for the creation, maintenance, and ongoing assessment of the revised and required curriculum for science education for preservice elementary teachers. Challenges facing the program and plans to address these challenges are also noted.
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Many instructional strategies exist that address poor student success in the sciences. They often go untapped, however, due to the knowledge or time needed for implementation. This article presents a formula for success that has encouraged a significant proportion of faculty in a physics department to adopt teaching methods, involving the use of clickers in lecture, that support student-centered learning. Interview data from faculty new to the use of clickers and student survey data regarding attitudes toward clicker use are presented. The findings shed light on the potential of using clickers to ease faculty into implementing other proven instructional pedagogies.
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Case studies pertaining to the health benefits of foods can be particularly effective in engaging students and in teaching core concepts in science (Heidemann and Urquart 2005). This case study focuses on the chemistry of curcumin, the health-promoting ingredient in turmeric. The case was developed to review core concepts in organic chemistry and to provide students with an opportunity to apply these concepts to a problem that they could relate to. The case could be adapted and used in courses in biochemistry and food science classes for the same purposes, because the chemical concepts covered in the case are ones also covered in these courses.
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To improve retention and engagement, first-year college science majors enrolled in University Experience orientation courses participated in a hands-on laboratory research experience: a DNA barcoding project to facilitate species identification. Students collected arthropods and hypothesized morphology-based species identifications. Then they isolated DNA from specimens, performed polymerase chain reaction (PCR), sequenced the product, and performed a DNA-based identification, to test the morphological hypothesis. Participants in these exercises earned higher biology GPAs and were more likely to become a science major or remain enrolled at Western Kentucky University than students in a control section who did not participate in this research experience.
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Research has suggested that a service-learning component can add a powerful dimension to learning course content in a variety of science disciplines, in addition to assisting students in seeing connections between their studies and the world outside the classroom. This article describes a tropical ecology course designed for science preservice teachers that was taught in Costa Rica and contained several service-learning requirements.
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Career development is an important issue, and there are aspects of finding the right position that are particular to science faculty. Although this article does not follow the usual format and subject of submissions to our Point of View column, we have chosen to publish this as a service to our readership. It is adapted from a similar article that was published on the website of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.
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To encourage students to seek research opportunities with campus faculty, one large university in the Southeast created a course entitled Science for All. A major goal of the course was to encourage students to work directly with faculty on research projects of their interest. Overall, the findings show that some of the participants began to engage in research activities while taking this course. However, overall the course lacked engaging pedagogy, student input, and participation. These findings indicate that students may have felt excluded from the research practice community, may not have understood what they were listening to, or may have found the process of doing research to be inaccessible. Although these findings are tentative, they represent new knowledge in the field.
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Eight Earth science graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) participated in a semester-long seminar designed to facilitate change in their practice. The seminar used lesson-study methodology to facilitate discussion of GTAs’ beliefs about teaching while planning a research lesson for implementation in their laboratory. This article reports the results regarding GTAs’ consensus perspectives about interactions with faculty in the context of laboratory teaching and discusses eight themes that emerged from the consensus-establishing process. The article concludes with implications for faculty teaching large lecture classes and their interactions with GTAs teaching the associated laboratories.
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Students are scientifically literate when they can read material about science and intelligently communicate their viewpoints, comments, and critiques, using scientific vocabulary and applying the ideas of the process and nature of science. As part of their normal class, 80 students were asked to find an article on the internet, read it, and then write one page of comments to hand in. From the collected papers, six categories of comments emerged: Emotion, Opinion, Knowledge, Society, Motivation, and Technical. The majority of the students wrote comments that suggest they were thinking about how the article fits in their world.
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Although worm bins have been used by K–12 and nonformal educators for decades, there is little evidence of their use in postsecondary education. The ease of use, maintenance, affordability, portability, and diversity of scientific concepts that can be demonstrated with a worm bin make it a valuable tool in college science classrooms. The purpose of this article is to report on the use of worm bins in introductory environmental science classes to demonstrate and promote discussion about the biological processes environmental benefits of composting. It also describes adaptations for using the worm bin in other science courses.
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