The widespread transition to online teaching as a result of the global pandemic moved chemistry laboratory experiences online. At UBC's Okanagan campus, organic chemistry laboratory instruction was delivered synchronously to maximize student interactions with their teaching assistants. Two methods of online delivery were employed: (1) students…

This article analyzes masculinity and experimental practices within three different physics communities. This work is premised on the understanding that the discipline of physics is not only dominated by men, but also is laden with masculine connotations on a symbolical level, and that this limited and limiting construction of physics has made it…

Even though reward systems play a central role in the management of organizations, their impact on stress and the well-being of workers is not well understood. We review the literature linking performance-based reward systems to various indicators of employee stress and well-being. Well-controlled experiments in field settings suggest that certain…

This article describes a case study involving an assistive device that aided a student with low vision registered in the introductory physics course at Trent University in the fall of 2009. His Snellen visual acuity fluctuated significantly, with an average acuity of about 20/400. This low acuity presented obvious difficulties for him with the…

We report on an experiment conducted with pre-service teachers in France and in Quebec. They were submitted to a classroom situation involving regular polyhedra. We expected that through the activities of defining, of exploring and experimenting via concrete constructions and manipulation, students would reflect on the link face angle--dihedral…

Science instruction literature provides us with goals for laboratory instruction and guidelines for designing and implementing science labs in the post-secondary setting. How well are we doing in our attempt to provide a meaningful and positive learning experience for our students? This paper describes the results of a study to determine whether…

Innovation is essential for the education sector. The ways in which curriculum decision making is organised reflects different implicit approaches on how educational systems pertain to promote innovation in education. Curriculum holds an outstanding place when seeking to promote innovation in education, as it reflects the vision for education by…

The microbial growth curve is widely studied within microbiology classes and bacteria are usually the microbial model used. Here, we describe a novel laboratory protocol involving flow cytometry to assess the growth dynamics of the unicellular microalgae "Isochrysis galbana." The algal model represents an appropriate alternative to…

Educated adults solve simple addition problems primarily by direct memory retrieval, as opposed to by counting or other procedural strategies, but they report using retrieval substantially less often with problems in written-word format (four = eight) compared with digit format (4 = 8). It was hypothesized that retrieval efficiency is relatively…

The item-specific proportion congruent (ISPC) effect refers to the observation that the Stroop effect is larger for words that are presented mostly in congruent colors (e.g., "BLUE" presented 75% of the time in blue) and smaller for words that are presented mostly in a given incongruent color (e.g., "YELLOW" presented 75% of…

The law of conservation of momentum is one that students often have difficulties understanding. This experiment allows students to use childhood toys to examine and calculate the muzzle velocity of their favourite water gun by using an air track, a spark timer or data logger and the law of conservation of momentum in a one-dimensional case, a…

A variety of experimental evidence indicates that the memory representation for multiplication facts (e.g., 6 [times] 9 = 54) incorporates bidirectional links with a forward association from factors to product and a reverse association from product to factors. Surprisingly, the authors did not find evidence in Experiment 1 of facilitative…

Drawing from educational research conducted in Canada and Mexico, university researchers explore how culture complicates both the ethics review process and the translation of ethical research principles into practice. University researchers in Canadian contexts seek approval from university Research Ethics Boards to conduct research, following…

Thirty-six three- to four-year-old children were tested to assess whether hearing a word-referent link from an ignorant speaker affected children's abilities to subsequently link the same word with an alternative referent offered by another speaker. In the principal experimental conditions, children first heard either an ignorant or a…

This article addresses an impasse in debates about online education in university education. One side presents a story of the progressive development of technology as it is applied to the organisation of higher education, leading to pedagogical advances and to the new forms of administration required for the realisation of the technology's full…