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Journal Article

Eye and Face Protection in School Science

Choosing what eye and face protection to provide for the high school science laboratory is often a challenge. Science teachers and school administrators may not fully understand the relevant safety regulations and standards or be able to correctly id...

Journal Article

Visualizing NeuroscienceL Learning about the Brain through Art

Neuroscience is a subject that can motivate, excite, and stimulate the curiosity of everyone. However, the study of the brain is made difficult by an abundance of new vocabulary words and abstract concepts. The art activities included in this article...

Journal Article

Phylogenetic Reconstruction as a Broadly Applicable Teaching Tool in the Biology Classroom: The Value of Data in Estimating Likley Answers

This laboratory exercise introduces students to a fundamental tool in evolutionary biology--phylogenetic inference. Students are required to create a data set via observation and through mining preexisting data sets. These student data sets are the...

Journal Article

Magnifying Students' Interest in Science

Textbooks often teach students that there is one scientific process of science that must be rigidly followed—which leads them to equate science with boredom! However, these negative perceptions can be eliminated by integrating visual art and micros...

Journal Article

Scope on Safety: Dust off your safety procedures

The National Air Pollution Central Administration estimates that over 43 million tons of dust falls on the United States yearly. Now, add to the dust and dirt scenario the exposures in a laboratory environment (such as hazardous chemical vapors, part...

Journal Article

Cooperative Learning in the Science Classroom

To help high school science teachers make sense of the extensive cooperative learning research over the last two decades, this article summarizes the major ideas behind the cooperative learning teaching model, provides educational research evidence t...

Journal Article

Adapting to the Deep Sea: A Fun Activity with Bioluminescence

The deepest parts of the oceans are currently the focus of many new discoveries in both the physical and biological sciences. Middle school students find the deep sea fascinating and especially seem to enjoy its mysterious and "spooky" side. Bring th...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Light in the media spotlight

Movies, music, cartoons, comics, popular literature, and internet websites are all powerful resources for science teachers. Collectively, these media transform words from a textbook into reference points for understanding a complex world. This articl...

Journal Article

Editor's Roundtable: Creative connections

By integrating creative projects into their instruction, science teachers have the opportunity to awaken "creative expression and knowledge into their students." This month’s Editor’s Roundtable column highlights the articles in this issue of Sci...

Journal Article

Tried and True: How the brain visually perceives the world

The eyes are said to be the "mirror of the soul" or similiar to the "lens of a camera." Have you ever wondered how such a small feature of our anatomy can have such a big impact on our abilities to perceive the world around us? These classic activiti...

Journal Article

Undergraduate Research Communities: A Powerful Approach to Research Training

We applied the concept of learning communities, whereby students develop their ideas in cohort-based settings, to undergraduate research training. This creates powerful research communities where students practice science from observation to experim...

Journal Article

Talking Science, Modeling Scientists

Do you want your students to share their investigation findings in a meaningful way? Or to communicate like real scientists do--beyond conducting investigations in the classroom? Fourth-grade students in the Upstate of South Carolina are doing just...

Journal Article

Commentary: Laboratory Science Teacher Professional Development

In 2004, the U.S. Secretary of Energy announced a new science education initiative to reinvigorate the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) involvement in K-12 science education. Part of this new initiative is a revitalized professional development prog...

Journal Article

Editorial: A Change in Terrain or a Shift in Perspective?

Guess what? While you weren't looking, the world got flattened. At least, that's the conclusion of Thomas L. Friedman in his explosive book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Friedman asserts that a recent confluence o...

Journal Article

Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer Reading

Whether your summer includes travel to far away places or day trips to familiar haunts, this time of change should also be a time of professional growth. Whatever path you walk this summer, take along a book. You may already have your own list of "...

Journal Article

A Fifth Grader's Guide to the World

The challenge for today's elementary teachers is not whether but rather how to use computers to effectively teach students essential skills and concepts. One exciting way of meeting this challenge is to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS), comp...

Journal Article

Assessing Student Understanding with Technology

Most science teachers are amazed when grading tests and quizzes, often wondering how and why students have reached a conclusion, particularly when students fail to provide a detailed account of their logic. Ideally, a variety of assessments should be...

Journal Article

Research and Teaching: Active Learning Is Not Enough

In this article, the author examines the frequency of assessment and how it impacts learning in an undergraduate biology course employing a student-centered, active learning pedagogy. Frequent assessment was associated with better student performanc...

Journal Article

Turning the Potential Liability of Large Enrollment Laboratory Science Courses Into an Asset

Data sharing among multiple lab sections increases statistical power of data analyses and informs student-generated hypotheses. This article describes how to collect, organize, and manage data to support replicate and rolling inquiry models, with th...

Journal Article

Information Literacy in Introductory Biology

Incorporating information literacy exercises into the science curriculum will help students to navigate through the myriad of information available in different formats, and to become better scientific thinkers and writers. Here we describe how we i...

Journal Article

Capturing Student Interest in Astrobiology Through Dilemmas and Paradoxes

Astrobiology is an interdisciplinary science course that combines essential questions from life, physical, and Earth sciences. An effective astrobiology course also capitalizes on students' natural curiosity about social science implications of stud...

Journal Article

The Case Study: Assessment of Case Study Teaching -- Where Do We Go From Here? Part II

It is natural for faculty to select paradigms with which they have familiarity, and in the sciences, measurement is a careful, precise aspect of the research method. In science there has been a bias towards counting. However, measurement is not as ...

Journal Article

Favorite Demonstration: How Scientists Use Critical-Thinking Skills -- Isolating Both Total RNA and Protein Using the Same Small Organ

Undergraduate biology programs are currently undergoing reform to involve students in biomedical research. Engaging students in more active, hands-on experiments allows students to discover scientific principles for themselves, and to develop techni...

Journal Article

Bridging the Gap: A Research-Based Approach for Teaching Interdisciplinary Science to Undergraduate Freshman Students

A new program, On Recent Discoveries by Emory Researchers (ORDER), has been developed as a bridge across the ever-widening gap between graduate and undergraduate education in the sciences. This bridge is created by merging the needs of graduate/post...

Journal Article

Introducing Evolution Using Online Activities in a Nonmajor Biology Course

Effective virtual education requires activities that promote application of scientific thinking skills, elaboration of research questions, hypothesis proposal, experimental design, and result presentation in a collaborative environment. Blackboard i...

Journal Article

Blogs: Applications in Science Education

Blogs are reshaping our political, social, and cultural environment. Education is affected by blogs because of their potential for learning and teaching, and also their risks. This article elaborates on a set of rules for evaluating and implementin...

Journal Article

Editorial: The Terman Oscillation

Lewis Terman's ghost is everywhere. He's present in spirit in every SAT score, every curriculum reassessment, and in every curriculum policy change. Terman is the Stanford, in Stanford-Binet, one of the first and most long-standing tests of human i...

Journal Article

The Effectiveness of Online Homework in an Introductory Science Class

Does the use of an online homework system such as WebAssign in an introductory astronomy course affect student performance? Four sections of introductory astronomy were compared in various homework situations, from no graded homework to graded homew...