To enhance students' critical thinking in an undergraduate general science course, we designed and implemented active learning modules by incorporating group-based learning with authentic tasks, scaffolding, and individual reports. This study examined the levels of critical thinking students exhibited in individual reports and the students'…

Partnerships and collaboration have become popular in higher education; and partnerships with community agencies, K-12 schools, and businesses are common. However, formal and sustained partnerships among institutions of higher education are not nearly as widespread. This article presents a model for collaboration in higher education focused on a…

Learning communities can strengthen early undergraduates' learning, but planning them can be daunting for instructors. Learning communities usually rely on integrative assignments that encourage interdisciplinary analysis. This article reports on our experiences using microloans as an interdisciplinary assignment in a learning community that…

This article explores the organizational impediments and facilitators that influence the implementation of student learning outcomes assessment (SLOA). This review points to the importance of culture, leadership, and organizational policies to the implementation of SLOA. However, we need to approach research differently, both conceptually and…

Undergraduates who persevere to the fourth year of their academic careers have invested a great deal of time, effort, and financial resources in their education. In spite of the effort, many do not succeed in graduating. Students from an entering class of first-time, full time freshmen from a large urban university were tracked through their…

Pupil talk and discussion are seen as having important social and cognitive outcomes. In science classes, pupils' collaborative talk supports the construction of meaning and helps examine the status of evidence, theory and knowledge. However, pupil interactive talk in groups is rare in science lessons. The research reported is part of a project to…

Grading practices can send a powerful message to students about course expectations. A study by Henderson et al. ("American Journal of Physics" 72:164-169, 2004) in physics education has identified a misalignment between what college instructors say they value and their actual scoring of quantitative student solutions. This work identified three…

The primary aim of this study was two-fold: 1) to identify salient psychosocial features of the classroom environment that influence students' motivation and self-regulation in science learning; and 2) to examine the effect of the motivational constructs of learning goal orientation, science task value and self-efficacy in science learning on…

In this study the effects of different learning environments on the promotion of decision-making competence for the socioscientific issue of genetically modified crops is investigated. The comparison focuses on direct vs. indirect instructions. Therefore on the one hand a sophisticated decision-making strategy was presented to the directly…

Ensuring the quality of investigations requires the understanding of procedures by which empirical evidence is obtained. This can be interpreted as becoming aware of and using criteria for evidence in one's mental structure. The question is whether this process can be observed in practice. In two schools for pre-university education where 11th…

Learning about certain scientific topics has potential to spark strong emotions among students. We investigated whether emotions predicted students' attitudes after engaging in independent rereading and/or rereading plus discussion about Pluto's reclassification. Fifth and sixth grade students read a refutation text on Pluto's reclassification.…

The research is an investigation of teachers' experience of working with socio-scientific issues (SSI). A large group of teachers (55) chose one of six cases with the characteristics of SSI and were free to organize the work as they found appropriate. The research focuses on how teachers chose content, organized their work and experienced the…

Many students in secondary schools consider the sciences difficult and unattractive. This applies to physics in particular, a subject in which students attempt to learn and understand numerous theoretical concepts, often without much success. A case in point is the understanding of the concepts current, voltage and resistance in simple electric…

Large enrolment science courses play a significant role in educating undergraduate students. The discourse in these classes usually involves an instructor lecturing with little or no student participation, despite calls from current science education reform documents to elicit and utilize students' ideas in teaching. In this study, we used the 5E…

This paper describes a study conducted in the context of chemistry education reforms in Israel. The study examined a new biochemistry learning unit that was developed to promote in-depth understanding of 3D structures and functions of proteins and nucleic acids. Our goal was to examine whether, and to what extent teaching and learning via…