Socioscientific issues (SSIs), or controversial scientific issues with social implications, influence members of society regardless of demographic. SSIs are contentious and ill-structured, meaning they do not have a definitive answer. To properly equip students with the tools needed to handle SSIs, undergraduate science curricula emphasize…

Evolution is central to biology education and yet, it is often one of the most misunderstood and controversial topics that biology educators must teach. Research spanning the last four decades has shown that students continue to struggle, even with direct instruction, to understand the process of evolution by natural selection. In my first…

This qualitative action research study examines how middle and high school STEM teachers create and implement lessons that connect concepts to the real-world and develop student metacognition. The researcher collected data through interviews, focus groups, document analysis, and survey questions. Participants from vocational, private, and…

As global challenges increasingly require an interdisciplinary approach, this study highlights the urgency of taking stock of the forces that guide how teachers navigate complicated concepts in their classrooms such as climate change. This study takes up science education more specifically and emphasizes that not only is it important that students…

Superfund Sites and other harmful environmental conditions disproportionately affect urban America and Black communities. Historically, many affected citizens were unaware of these conditions until the environmental justice movement. Due to insufficient opportunities to develop scientific literacy, many members of the community remain unaware of…

This study examined secondary science teachers' conceptions of democratic citizenship and their beliefs about how citizenship relates to science education. These beliefs and conceptions were studied through a framework comprised of theories of belief, citizenship education, and civic engagement with science. Data were collected from 10 teachers…

The theory of evolution is the central combing theory that brings together all the tenets of biology that bring about a solid understanding of life. It is also one of the most controversial scientific theories of all time and is widely rejected by about 40% of the general public in the United States. One of the biggest reasons for low evolution…

The purpose of this study was to explore how student behaviors, while using an adaptive courseware system, influenced performance in a gateway biology course. This study used a mixed methods approach. Quantitative data was collected from the course's learning management system (LMS) and the adaptive courseware. This data was analyzed using…

I conducted a set of four studies to catalogue and examine course elements, including active learning strategies and evidence-based teaching practices, and their influence on student experiences and performance in college biology classes. In the first study, I defined the term "active learning" and catalogued the 300[plus] strategies…

This dissertation investigates inservice elementary teachers' nature of science (NOS) and nature of technology (NOT) implementation and development of NOS views. These investigations are done in three separate studies: views of NOS, implementation of NOS, and implementation of NOT. While the NOS is a necessary part of learning that should take…

Recently, there have been many calls for an increase in instruction on the nature of science (NOS) in schools (i.e. NRC, 1996; NGSS Lead States, 2013). These calls recognize the importance of this topic at all levels of science education, but there is little guidance in terms of how to address it effectively in curricula. Similarly, there have…

Climate change and the resulting and related environmental and humanitarian outcomes are some of the fundamental challenges of the 21st century. Green chemistry, a relatively recent addition to the chemistry family, aims to reframe chemistry so that chemistry ethically and responsibly attends to its own environmental and human health impacts and…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effectiveness of scripted biology curriculum as a means of providing students with the information required to increase content knowledge, while comparing curriculum developed by the teacher that utilizes the Understanding by Design (UbD) framework (2005). The study is guided by two research questions:…

Background: English language learners (ELLs) are dramatically increasing in U.S. schools: by 2025, 25% of public school students will be ELLs (NEA, 2018). In one teacher education program in the Southeastern U.S., all students earning teacher certification must complete a course in second language methodology. This study seeks to understand…

This mixed methods research studied the effect of the Journey Method with Google Maps, a memorization strategy for memorizing informational text, on the recallability levels in high school biology students at an urban high school in Paterson, New Jersey. This memorization technique was based on an ancient memorization strategy, called the method…