All Journal of College Science Teaching resources

Journal Article

FIRST: A Model for Developing New Science Faculty

Developing education skills in future college faculty is challenging. At the postdoctoral level, Fellowships in Research and Science Teaching (FIRST) fellows effectively integrate research with mentored undergraduate teaching experiences and foster i...

Journal Article

Modeling the Research Process: Alternative Approaches to Teaching Undergraduates

An Introduction to Research course was modified to better teach the process of scientific inquiry to students who were not engaged in research projects. Students completed several tasks involved in research projects, including making presentations in...

Journal Article

Favorite Demonstration: A Fruity Biochemistry Demonstration

Inquiry, high-order thinking, reasoning skills, and critical thinking are buzzwords for the outcomes for which college science instructors strive. They can all be succinctly summarized as "get students thinking about what they are learning." Classr...

Journal Article

Society for College Science Teachers: Grade Inflation -- Is Ranking Students the Answer?

In recent years, several solutions have been proposed at various institutions nationwide to curb the phenomena of "grade inflation". Solutions include limiting the number of A's awarded, converting to a +/- system, publishing the class GPA next to e...

Journal Article

The Case Study: The Pima Experience -- Three Easy Pieces

The Academic Director of a University Honors Program in Buffalo, NY finds himself at Pima Community College, one of the nation's premier minority/majority systems. While working on an NSF grant, it was proposed that his group travel the country, dis...

Journal Article

Curriculum Integration: Preparing Prospective Teachers

This article describes a science methods course that prepares preservice teachers to integrate a curriculum around thematic units. The project enables students to pull together standards, specific content, teaching strategies, learning activities, a...

Journal Article

Learning to Teach: The Role of Evidence

Prospective science teachers should be taught how to base their planning and instructional decisions on the systematic analysis of evidence of student understanding. We describe three investigations that teach future secondary school science teachers...

Journal Article

Promoting Physical Science to Education Majors: Making Connections between Science and Teaching

We address student attitudes toward physical science content knowledge and skills by modeling pedagogy appropriate for the K–8 classroom. Attitude measurements show that students are initially reticent in their approach to learning science. Upon co...

Journal Article

DNA as a Binary Code: How the Physical Structure of Nucleotide Bases Carries Information

The DNA triplet code also functions as a binary code. Because double-ring compounds cannot bind to double-ring compounds in the DNA code, the sequence of bases classified simply as purines or pyrimidines can encode for smaller groups of possible amin...

Journal Article

The Case Study: A Word to the Wise? Advising Freshman

Freshman frequently struggle with major decisions both in and out of school. Even if they attend required advisement sessions, they do not always have a clear idea of which questions to ask and which information to share with the advisor. To focus ...