Laboratory education can play a vital role in developing a learner's autonomy and scientific inquiry skills. In an innovative, mutation-based learning (MBL) approach, students were instructed to redesign a teacher-designed standard experimental protocol by a "mutation" method in a molecular genetics laboratory course. Students could…

Instructors and the teaching practices they employ play a critical role in improving student learning in college science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. Consequently, there is increasing interest in collecting information on the range and frequency of teaching practices at department-wide and institution-wide scales. To…

Students often complain about their perceived disconnect between the time and effort spent studying and their subsequent performance on exams. Robert Bjork's research asserts that retrieval of stored information acts as a memory modifier, and that using tests as learning events creates "desirable difficulties that enhance learning."…

Numerous studies are demonstrating that engaging undergraduate students in original research can improve their achievement in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and increase the likelihood that some of them will decide to pursue careers in these disciplines. Associated with this increased prominence of research in…

Students in introductory biology courses frequently have misconceptions regarding natural selection. In this paper, we describe six activities that biology instructors can use to teach undergraduate students in introductory biology courses how natural selection causes evolution. These activities begin with a lesson introducing students to natural…

One goal of postsecondary education is to assist students in developing expert-level understanding. Previous attempts to encourage expert-level understanding of phylogenetic analysis in college science classrooms have largely focused on isolated, or "one-shot," in-class activities. Using a deliberate practice instructional approach, we…

There are widespread aspirations to focus undergraduate biology education on teaching students to think conceptually like biologists; however, there is a dearth of assessment tools designed to measure progress from novice to expert biological conceptual thinking. We present the development of a novel assessment tool, the Biology Card Sorting Task,…

Columbia University offers two innovative undergraduate science-based bioethics courses for student majoring in biosciences and pre-health studies. The goals of these courses are to introduce future scientists and healthcare professionals to the ethical questions they will confront in their professional lives, thus enabling them to strategically…

Interest in faculty careers decreases as graduate training progresses; however, the process underlying career-interest formation remains poorly defined. To better understand this process and whether/how it differs across social identity (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender), we conducted focus groups with 38 biomedical scientists who received PhDs…

The biology education community focuses a great deal of time and energy on issues of "what" students should be learning in the modern age of biology and then probing the extent to which students are learning these things. There has been increased focus over time on the "how" of teaching, with attention to questioning the…

In this article, the author's attempt to provide an overview of the types of student resistance one might encounter in a classroom, as well as share hypotheses from other disciplines about the potential origins of student resistance. In addition, they offer examples of classroom strategies that have been proposed as potentially useful for…

The purpose of this design research is to improve the quality of environmental literacy and sustainability education in chemistry teaching through combining a socio-scientific issue, life-cycle analysis (LCA), with inquiry-based learning (IBL). This first phase of the cyclic design research involved 20 inservice trained chemistry teachers from…

As western society becomes increasingly reliant on scientific information to make decisions, citizens must be equipped to understand how scientific arguments are constructed. In order to do this, pre-service teachers must be prepared to foster students' abilities and understandings of scientific argumentation in the classroom. This study…

In order to teach science well, science teachers need to know what to focus on in order to ensure their assessment of student learning is meaningful and useful for the students' on going learning and development. The diversity and range of content and skills within the subject of science mean that the assessment capabilities required by…

A curriculum is a master plan that regulates teaching and learning. This paper compares Finnish and Thai primary school level science curricula to the PISA 2006 Scientific Literacy Framework. Curriculum comparison was made following the procedure of deductive content analysis. In the analysis, there were four main categories adopted from PISA…