Picture boards as a visual support aid for in-lab demonstrator briefings were deployed for a single experiment in both the first and second year undergraduate practical classes. The boards are easy to create and provide an alternative, more accessible and 'presentation friendly' perspective of the laboratory manual associated with an experiment.…

The COVID-19 pandemic posed significant challenges for practical teaching within the sciences. While many instructors adopted innovative alternatives to conventional practicals, many relied on digital approaches that did not give students hands-on experience. In this study we evaluate the use of 'at home' practical kits used in first year physics…

The paper compares the effectiveness of in-person and virtual engineering laboratory sessions. The in-person and virtual laboratory sessions reported here comprise six experiments combined with short tutorials. The virtual lab combined enquiry-based learning and gamification principles. The integration of the virtual labs with in-person teaching…

A laboratory experiment was developed to enable students to investigate the use of smart hydrogels for potential application in targeted drug delivery. This is challenging for students to explore practically because of the extremely high risks of handling cross-linking agents such as glutaraldehyde. Genipin is a safe and green alternative that has…

This article considers the role of experiments in learning in movements to democratise higher education "under the rule of capital" (Gutierrez, Navarro and Linsalata 2017). It focuses on the emergence of a new generation of "free universities" in the United Kingdom, situating these in a historical tradition of educational…

Laboratory practicals are used throughout science and engineering education as it allows students to undertake active learning and develop technical skills. It is therefore important that students arrive to these sessions as prepared as possible to maximise their learning potential. This paper analyses how student preparation affects how prepared…

The ability to handle chemicals safely is a key aspect of the learning development of students studying chemistry; however, there have been no previously reported investigations of the quantity of chemicals spilled by students during lab experiments. Therefore, the first part of this article reports the assessment of the volume of chemicals…

This article explores the development of a comprehensive and systemic approach to entrepreneurship education at a research-intensive university in the United Kingdom. The exploration is based on two key conceptual challenges: (a) taking entrepreneurship to mean something more than new business creation and (b) differentiating between…

In the past decades, society in general has become strongly diverse. This change also affects schools. As a result, learning groups cannot be seen as homogeneous and taught in this way. One of the challenges is students' linguistic skills. Dealing with different linguistic competencies should not only be a focus of formal education in schools but…

When reading from left to right, useful information acquired during each fixational pause is widely assumed to extend 14 to 15 characters to the right of fixation but just 3 to 4 characters to the left, and certainly no further than the beginning of the fixated word. However, this leftward extent is strikingly small and seems inconsistent with…

It has been suggested that the preview benefit effect is actually a combination of preview benefit and preview costs. Marx et al. (2015) proposed that visually degrading the parafoveal preview reduces the costs associated with traditional parafoveal letter masks used in the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), thus leading to a more neutral baseline.…

Year-one chemistry students at two different institutions were asked to rate the importance of a series of discipline-specific, transferable and laboratory skills by responding to a series of Likert-type questions. The students at both institutions had studied similar curricula but had different levels of experience of the Context and Problem…

Humans have a unique ability to generate novel norms. Faced with the knowledge that there are hungry children in Somalia, we easily and naturally infer that we ought to donate to famine relief charities. Although a contentious and lively issue in metaethics, such inference from "is" to "ought" has not been systematically…

In this article, the authors consider the possibility that groups could be different, because of the different conditions of a factor. This is as far as the analysis can extend: the consideration is restricted to groups characterized by the different category of the factor being considered. In many biological experiments, the factor considered may…

There is growing interest in the use of low enthalpy geothermal (LEG) energy schemes, whereby heated water is extracted from sandstone aquifers for civic heating projects. While prevalent in countries with volcanic activity, a recently proposed scheme for Manchester offered the perfect opportunity to engage students in the viability of this form…