The United States currently lags behind globally in the areas of math and science. In order to compete and meet the skills necessary for the future workforce, it has become necessary to seek out instructional strategies that will increase student achievement in those academic areas. With the wide variety of diversity occurring in public schools…

Food and conservation science curriculum, net-zero design and student-based building performance monitoring have come together in the unique and innovative new Music and Science Building for Oregon's Hood River Middle School. The school's Permaculture-based curriculum both informed the building design and was also transformed through the…

For students to develop an understanding of science content and processes, teachers must create classroom environments in which students use inquiry to understand the natural world. However, teachers frequently find it difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate complex scientific concepts, which textbooks often fail to properly explain. During…

The United Nations has proclaimed 2011 as the International Year of Chemistry and, as part of that designation, has invited teachers worldwide to participate with their students in the Global Water Experiment (IYC 2010). Students have the opportunity to take part in four different water-related investigations to assess water quality and then share…

The rapid progress of wireless communication, sensing, and mobile technologies has enabled students to learn in an environment that combines learning resources from both the real world and the digital world. It can be viewed as a new learning style which has been called context-aware ubiquitous learning. Most context-aware ubiquitous learning…

Educational games intend to make learning more enjoyable, but carry the potential cost of compromising learning efficiency by consuming both instructional time and student cognitive resources. Therefore, instead of creating an educational game, the authors create a learning environment with game-like elements, the aspects of games that are…

A practical exercise for developing a simple cost-effective solar ultraviolet radiation dosimeter is presented for use by middle school science students. Specifically, this exercise investigates a series of experiments utilising the historical blue print reaction, combining ammonium iron citrate and potassium hexacyanoferrate to develop an…

There is a rising trend to provide low-cost laptops to children in developing countries. Notwithstanding strong claims about the educational effectiveness of these programs, there is very little systematic evidence. Given the level of modernization and the teacher-led learning environment in developing countries, the usage of laptops in such…

An initial goal of chemistry laboratory courses is almost always the "proper" use of laboratory resources including glassware and instruments. The proper use of glassware encompasses many topics, such as laboratory safety, technical proficiency, and recognition of function. However, as many chemical educators can attest, at both the K-12 and…

Being told procedures and concepts before problem solving can inadvertently undermine the learning of deep structures in physics. If students do not learn the underlying structure of physical phenomena, they will exhibit poor transfer. Two studies on teaching physics to adolescents compared the effects of "telling" students before and after…

In the context of a teaching experiment in elementary group theory, interesting difficulties arose as undergraduate students struggled to make sense of the meaning of the associative property as they reinvented the group concept. A subsequent exploration of the research literature revealed similar difficulties have been observed in research with…

A stratified random sample of volunteer participants (N = 75) aged 9 to 14 was drawn from 16 public school districts' gifted programs, including as many females (n = 28) and children from groups traditionally underrepresented in gifted programs (n = 18) as available. Participants were randomly divided into an experimental (n = 38) and a control…

Thought experiments enable students to think about persistent social issues by drawing on both knowledge and imagination. In this article, the author provides examples of thought experiments found in literature for adults and middle school students, a rationale for doing thought experiments in the classroom, a step-by-step procedure to follow, and…

A low-cost portable fluorimeter was constructed using a 360 nm LED for excitation and a silicon photodiode for detection. The instrument is simple to operate and has been used to investigate fluorescent whitening agents extracted from various brands of paper, to determine the linear range and limit of detection of quinine in various commercial…

Questionnaire and interview findings from a survey of three Year 8 (ages 12-13 years) science practical lessons (n = 52) demonstrate how pupils' data collection and inference making were sometimes biased by desires to confirm a personal theory. A variety of behaviours are described where learners knowingly rejected anomalies, manipulated…