Although most students in nonmajor biology courses will not enter careers in science, they will need a working understanding of biology and how it relates to their lives to make informed decisions on important topics that will affect their lives, including food, environment, energy, and health. This research seeks to improve on nonmajors'…

Environmental problems are a factor that influences the health of the world's great population. Developed countries make pollution part of a serious problem in urban industrial centers. The aim of this research is to address the following objectives: (1) to analyze the trend in the number of environmental literacy research conducted annually; (2)…

Science advances through the interplay of idea construction and idea critique. Our goal was to describe varied forms of productive disciplinary engagement that emerged during primary literature discussions. Such descriptions are necessary for biology educators and researchers to design for and recognize diverse repertoires of participation in the…

The systems thinking approach requires understanding and interpreting complex systems. This review investigated how the systems thinking approach in science education is positioned in peer-reviewed empirical research articles and to identify the trends used in the current literature. A systematic review of open-access, empirical peer-reviewed…

Education about scientific publishing and manuscript peer review is not universally provided in undergraduate science courses. Since peer review is integral to the scientific process and central to the identity of a scientist, we envision a paradigm shift where teaching peer review becomes integral to undergraduate science education. We…

Most studies on inquiry have focused on student outcomes, teachers' conceptions of inquiry, implementation of inquiry in science classrooms, and inquiry coverage in science textbooks. Little is known about the nature of inquiry representation in science practitioner journals that serve as sources of inquiry science activities for many science…

Students in environmental sciences, ecology, or wildlife management are often reluctant to acquire training in basic laboratory techniques. To advocate the importance of this training, we reviewed literature in the fields of biological and environmental science for one frequently used technique--centrifugation--and evaluated whether centrifugation…

Instructors expect students to read before class to engage them in using higher-order thinking skills that are critical to performing in group work and engaging in discussions. As many instructors are aware, however, for various reasons many students don't read the assigned textbook. In this study, science news articles were used as prereadings to…

This study explores the views of doctoral students and supervisors about two doctoral thesis-writing models: the traditional monograph and the thesis that includes published articles in its body. Doctoral theses in biological and health sciences usually follow one of these two common models. Doctoral theses with publications are increasingly…

The term "Virtual Reality" currently refers to a profound sensory immersion of the user in a synthetically generated virtual environment. It is foreseen that virtual reality will gain a substantial role in the instruction of science. In this literature review, the purpose was to investigate the research on the utilization of virtual…

This column provides original articles on innovations in case study teaching, assessment of the method, as well as case studies with teaching notes. In this article, the author describes how she uses current biology-related news articles to introduce a course and its relevance, to actively engage students at the beginning of the semester, and…

This response to Samuelsson's typology for assessing deliberative democracy in classroom discussions views his analysis through an equity lens. It offers Young's model of communicative democracy as a resource and argues that incorporating that model's emphasis on greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling into the typology can help to promote more…

College instructors often teach scientific thinking by asking students to review and analyze a primary research article. The main purpose of this study was to explore how classroom response systems (CRS) could help impact the quality of written analysis papers submitted for this assignment by students taking 100-level biology courses at a…

The discipline-based education research (DBER) report from the National Research Council (2012) highlighted the existence of a research-practice gap in science instruction in higher education and the need to identify strategies to close it. This study hypothesizes that one potential factor is instructors' access to research-based…

Graduate-level reading groups serve as a primary forum for students to learn current and complex concepts in their field. Because graduate students lament that reading "abnormally long" articles discourage them from attending particular reading group sessions, we tested the hypothesis that attendance will decrease proportionally with…