By following their wonderful ideas or critical exploration, three eighth graders learned how to do traditional Chinese painting, which is taught by copying old masters' work from the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century. The standard manual, which most learners have been using for these three hundred years, is the "Mustard Seed Garden Manual of…

This paper highlights specific aspects of high-school students' reasoning while coping with a modeling task of plant growth in a computer-supported educational environment. It is particularly concerned with the modeling levels ('macro-phenomenological' and 'micro-conceptual' level) activated by peers while exploring plant growth and with their…

Little is known about the use of complementary and alternative medicine among the approximately 1.6 million migrant farmworkers in the United States. The purpose of this work was to evaluate the use of medicinal plants and natural remedies among a convenience sample of 100 migrant farmworkers living temporarily in a migrant worker center in El…

Teachers often struggle to excite students about geology, with most young people in today's technology-driven society being unfamiliar with rocks and minerals. Discussions centered on medical geology, the science that studies the link between normal environmental factors and geographical distribution of health problems, may help bridge the gap.…

Effective instruction requires continual assessment of student understanding to identify and redirect misconceptions. This is particularly important when dealing with topics that seem straightforward to the teacher but may go beyond the personal experience of many students, such as the life cycle of flowering plants. Life cycles are a core topic…

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a powerful instructional approach. By working through assessable complex problem-solving tasks learners can be encouraged to actively engage in investigation and inquiry and to use high level cognitive thought processes to solve real-life problems in professional contexts. A critical element of a successful PBL…

The purpose of this study is to prepare inquiry based experimental activities on the photosynthesis, thought to be a very difficult subject by pupils, and to determine the pupil's ideas towards this method. This study was made with 24 pupils from Grade 3 at Ataturk Anatolian High school in Turkey. As data gathering material; seven inquiry…

In this article, 41 models of covariation detection from 2 x 2 contingency tables were evaluated against past data in the literature and against data from new experiments. A new model was also included based on a limiting case of the normative phi-coefficient under an extreme rarity assumption, which has been shown to be an important factor in…

The water absorption in chickpeas (dried legumes) is analyzed. The chickpea experiment serves as an introduction to the concepts of osmosis, mass transfer and diffusion.

In this article we recount our experiences of teaching photosynthesis in an integrated way to secondary school students and teachers, science undergraduates and postgraduates. Conceptual questions were posed to investigate learners' fundamental understanding of simple light-dependent and light-independent processes taught to most students at…

The appeal as natural antidepressant is the major selling point of St. John's Wort, which is referred to as "Prozac from the plant kingdom". Hypericin and hyperforin, two major constituents with significant biological activity of St. John's Wort and which are complex molecules with unusual features, are examined.

There are a number of ways to capture student interest and improve student ability to understand complex phenomena. Without attempting any systematic assessment of the improvement in student learning the analogies, conversations with students lead to believe that techniques are a valuable tool in the botanist's toolbox.

This design study tracks the development of student thinking about natural variation as late elementary grade students learned about distribution in the context of modeling plant growth at the population level. The data-modeling approach assisted children in coordinating their understanding of particular cases with an evolving notion of data as an…

Exploration of the Chemistry of Plants is established as a part of the department offerings for nonmajor science students to fulfill their science general education requirement. Plant themes proved to be very suitable in capturing the interest of the nonmajor science students as an introduction to chemistry.

Undergraduate research experiences can be extremely valuable for students, but can also be very time-consuming for mentors. A series of surveys were administered to plant biologists during the last 4 years to understand the perspectives of mentors on training undergraduate and high school student researchers. The survey responses provided a wealth…