A broad-based survey using the Delphi method was conducted to garner current information from private sector stakeholders and build consensus opinions supporting key ideas for enhancing plant breeder education and training. This study asked respondents to suggest and rate topics and content they deemed most important to plant breeding graduate…

Recent National Research Council reports make compelling arguments for the need to incorporate spatial abilities and use spatial technologies throughout our educational system. We conducted a pilot study to determine the pedagogical effectiveness of teaching with geographic information systems (GIS) by using a web-based GIS tool of Indiana soils.…

Inquiry-based teaching helps students develop a deep, applied understanding of human-environmental connections, but most high school curricula do not use inquiry-based methods. Soil science topics, which are also generally lacking from curricula, can provide hands-on model systems for learning inquiry skills. We report on the implementation of a…

Web 2.0 technology is expanding rapidly from social and gaming uses into the educational applications. Specifically, the multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), such as SecondLife, allows educators to fill the gap of first-hand experience by creating simulated realistic evolving problems/games. In a pilot study, a team of educators at the…

Experiential learning describes structured educational opportunities that allow students to physically interact with the course material. This pedagogical technique promotes critical thinking, decision making, problem solving, and increases the retention of knowledge. Given that experiential learning can be employed in a variety of learning spaces…

Soil quality, soil health, and soil sustainability are concepts that are being widely used but are difficult to define and illustrate, especially to a non-technical audience. The objectives of this manuscript were to develop simple and inexpensive methodologies to both qualitatively and quantitatively estimate water infiltration rates (IR),…

Transfer students are of recognized importance to postsecondary education and every year feed thousands of students into natural resources programs across America. This influx of students can have a sustaining effect on many academic programs, including fisheries and wildlife programs, which are suffering from a nation-wide decrease in interest…

This study is an investigation of the epistemological beliefs and study habits of students undertaking first-year courses in Biological Chemistry and Biochemistry. In particular, we were interested in the relationship between students' epistemological beliefs about learning and knowledge, approaches to learning, and achievement. The study adopted…

This paper draws on the personal experiences of three researchers: an "outsider" (or western-oriented) science teacher, a science teacher educator who has lived in Melanesian countries for almost a decade, and a national researcher who was born and educated in Melanesia. During a recent interpretative research study of the problematic relationship…

This paper is based on a study of how students' read nature in different ecosystems. Its focus is on ecology and the context is outdoors. This literacy has to do with an ability to recognise organisms and relate them to material cycling and energy flow in the specific habitat that is to be read. A teaching sequence was designed in order to develop…

This paper presents a number of case studies in Oceanography, an optional module in the third/fourth year of a Master of Science programme at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The main objective was to gain more thorough insights into student learning by examining two sets of individual oral examinations. In addition, all students…

The present work discusses, firstly, different dimensions that characterize the use of analogies in the classroom. Foremost among these are the pupil's level of activity and the degree of monitoring carried out by the teacher. Secondly, the routines declared by a group of science teachers (n = 73), when they described their classroom activity in…

This paper presents a case study of a teaching intervention designed to enrich Year 2 students' theory of biology through the introduction of causal mechanisms of inheritance such as the gene and DNA. The researchers worked collaboratively with the classroom teacher to design the intervention based on the students' prior knowledge of living things…

A study on the effect of a structured problem-solving strategy on problem-solving skills and conceptual understanding of physics was undertaken with 189 students in 16 disadvantaged South African schools. This paper focuses on the development of conceptual understanding. New instruments, namely a solutions map and a conceptual index, are…

Recently, the significance of learners' informal reasoning on socio-scientific issues has received increasing attention among science educators. To gain deeper insights into this important issue, an integrated analytic framework was developed in this study. With this framework, 71 Grade 10 students' informal reasoning about nuclear energy usage…