Virtual laboratory activities are flexible approaches to engage undergraduate students in scientific practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. By utilizing online simulations, students can conduct virtual experiments on important biochemical reactions that occur during photosynthesis. The learning module described here provides students with this…

Background: Children's interactions are inherently multimodal. Accordingly, when children engage in science in classroom communities, their interactions are grounded in material and embodied aspects of interactions with teachers and their peers. Purpose: This study explores the nature of children's science interactions in a classroom community…

Incorporating research activities at the secondary-school level is an effective method to teach science; however, students and teachers may feel intimidated when trying to identify a suitable research topic. Ideas may be obtained from short articles in periodicals or newspapers to allow students to design their own experiments and interpret data.…

Scientific inquiry is both theoretical and empirical. It succeeds by bringing thought into productive harmony with the observable universe, and thus, students can attain a robust understanding of the nature of science (NOS) only by developing a balanced appreciation of both these dimensions. In this article, I examine naïve empiricism, a teaching…

Bridging organic and inorganic chemistry as well as molecular biology, this undergraduate experiment deals with the synthesis of ligands for metal complexes that can cleave DNA. Students gain theoretical and experimental expertise about metal--DNA interactions and the mechanisms behind DNA cleavage. This experiment lays a basis for the…

Background: In response to reform recommendations calling for students' engagement in scientific practices and the lack of the enactment of such practices in science classrooms, we explored the implementation of scientific practices with special emphasis on model-based inquiry in a secondary science teacher preparation program. Sample: The…

The Open Science movement has gained considerable traction in the last decade. The Open Science movement tries to increase trust in research results and open the access to all elements of a research project to the public. Central to these goals, Open Science has promoted five critical tenets: Open Data, Open Analysis, Open Materials,…

This study evaluated how the process of teaching scientific methodology occurs in technical courses in integrated high schools. The qualitative case study was conducted through documentary analysis (based on regulations and pedagogical projects) and semi-structured interviews with teachers (n=7), coordinators (n=3), and students (n=16) of the…

Though argumentation is a key component of scientific knowledge construction practices, it rarely occurs in classrooms worldwide. Moreover, related literature in the context of genetics and evolution learning primarily addresses them separately. In contrast, this paper is part of broader research on genetics and evolution instruction taught…

This article introduces Youth Participatory Science (YPS) as an approach to science teaching and grassroots knowledge production that draws from traditions of youth participatory action research (YPAR) and citizen science. YPS is differentiated from YPAR by its emphasis on the tools and methods of the so-called natural sciences while it extends…

Limited access to undergraduate research experiences for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students has led to creation of classroom-based opportunities for students to participate in authentic science. Revising laboratory courses to engage students in the practices of science has been shown to have many benefits for students.…

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are tools used to introduce students to authentic participation in science. Several specific CUREs have been shown to benefit students' interest and retention in the biological sciences. Nevertheless, CUREs vary greatly in terms of their context, methodology, and degree of research…

Most of the physics (as well as the other sciences) taught in school can be described as well-established or consensus science. This is the kind of science knowledge that was mostly developed over a century ago. The inclusion of contemporary science research in compulsory school science teaching could be justified from a variety of reasons:…

The social reaction to the recent detection of the Higgs boson and gravitational waves provided evidence that public interest in modern physics has reached a high point. Although these modern physics topics are being introduced into the upper secondary physics curricula in a growing number of countries, their potential for teaching various aspects…

Action research was conducted in two sections of a scientific inquiry class in a Midwestern U.S. university to identify the types of questions that students ask for their investigations, identify emerging patterns regarding students' questioning, and determine students' ability to transfer their nature of science (NOS) understanding to a new…