We describe an interactive collaborative environmental education project that makes advanced laboratory facilities at Brookhaven National Laboratory accessible for one-year or multi-year science projects for the high school level. Cyber-enabled Environmental Science (CEES) utilizes web conferencing software to bring multi-disciplinary,…

The basic currency of higher education--the credit hour--represents the root of many problems plaguing America's higher education system: the practice of measuring time rather than learning. "Cracking the Credit Hour" traces the history of this time-based unit, from the days of Andrew Carnegie to recent federal efforts to define a credit…

Research has documented two effects of interfeature causal knowledge on classification. A "causal status effect" occurs when features that are causes are more important to category membership than their effects. A "coherence effect" occurs when combinations of features that are consistent with causal laws provide additional…

We revised a sophomore-level genetics class to more actively engage the students in their learning. The students worked in groups on quizzes using the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique (IF-AT) and active-learning projects. The IF-AT quizzes allowed students to discuss key concepts in small groups and learn the correct answers in class. The…

Laboratory experiments are often considered the defining characteristic of science courses. Such activities provide students with real-world contexts for applying scientific concepts, while also allowing them to develop scientific ways of thinking and promoting an interest in science. In recent years, an increasing number of campuses have moved…

The current research article is based on a simple and practical way of employing the computational power of widely available, versatile software MS Excel 2007 to perform interactive computer simulations for undergraduate/graduate students in biology, biochemistry, biophysics, microbiology, medicine in college and university classroom setting. To…

One of the greatest challenges in teaching physics is helping students achieve a conceptual understanding of Newton's laws. I find that students fresh from middle school can sometimes recite the laws verbatim ("An object in motion stays in motion..." and "For every action..."), but they rarely demonstrate a working knowledge of…

The City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Journalism is testing a new model for journalism with an innovative hyperlocal news project with The New York Times. CUNY is not only providing interactive media instruction to budding professional journalists, but some of its students are helping train citizen journalists to contribute…

This paper studies the determinants of college major choice using a unique "information" experiment embedded in a survey. We first ask respondents their "self" beliefs--beliefs about their own expected earnings and other major-specific outcomes conditional on various majors, their "population" beliefs--beliefs about…

The major focus of this ethnographic study is devoted to exploring the confluence of global and local referents of science education in the context of an urban chemistry laboratory classroom taught by a first-generation Filipino-American male teacher. This study investigates encounters between the teacher and four second-generation immigrant…

Introduction: This study investigated the effect of cognitive styles on users' information-seeking task performance using a knowledge domain information visualization system called CiteSpace. Method: Sixteen graduate students participated in a user experiment. Each completed an extended cognitive style analysis wholistic-analytic test (the…

The authors examined patterns of facilitation under forward-masked priming conditions across 3 list contexts (Experiments 1-3) that varied with respect to properties of filler trials--(a) mixed (morphological, orthographic, semantic), (b) identity, and (c) semantic--but held the relatedness proportion constant (75%). Facilitation for targets that…

Comprehension of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) requires reevaluation of recently processed constituents, which often necessitates retrieval of information about the elided constituent from memory. A. E. Martin and B. McElree (2008) argued that representations formed during comprehension are content addressable and that VPE antecedents are retrieved…

In episodic memory tasks, associations are formed between items presented close together in time. The temporal context model (TCM) hypothesizes that this contiguity effect is a consequence of shared temporal context rather than temporal proximity per se. Using double-function lists of paired associates (e.g., A-B, B-C) presented in a random order,…

Researchers have often overlooked the relationships between sex and ratings of word characteristics, such as concreteness, context-availability, imageability, and emotionality. The current study investigated whether or not sex differences exist in such ratings for abstract, concrete, and emotion words. The results indicated that females rated…