For distance-education students, the requirement for a laboratory course can present a significant hurdle to completing degree requirements. To better serve these nontraditional students, the authors developed a distance version of the laboratory course to provide a hands-on experience similar to that of on-campus students. In order to make the…

This article describes the use of the "glabrous1 (g11)" mutant and constitutively active "(CA)-rop2" transgenic plants of "Arabidopsis thaliana" in teaching genetics laboratory for both high school and undergraduate students. The experiments provide students with F[subscript 1] and F[subscript 2] generations within a semester for genetic and…

The work done in a chemistry laboratory is compared to cooking, as both processes use books for reference. It is felt that cooking and chemistry are complex processes and are creative endeavors that require skills beyond those developed by merely following the directions.

The enzyme orotidine-5'-monophosphate decarboxylase is an attractive choice for the central theme of an integrated, research-based biochemistry laboratory course. A series of laboratory exercises common to most instructional laboratories, including enzyme assays, protein purification, enzymatic characterization, elementary kinetics, and…

Core concepts can be integrated throughout lower-division science and engineering courses by using a series of related, cross-referenced laboratory experiments. Starting with butane combustion in chemistry, the authors expanded the underlying core concepts of energy transfer into laboratories designed for biology, physics, and engineering. This…

Librarians instruct students where to find information, but rarely demonstrate its management, while faculty have difficulty incorporating real-time laboratory experience with library research. This paper focuses on the development of a hands-on biology laboratory experiment in an introductory course that integrates bibliographic software into the…

This paper reports the modification of an existing experimental subject into a project laboratory for first-year physics students studying in the first cycle of university level and at a higher professional level. The subject is aimed at developing important science-related competences and skills through concrete steps under circumstances that are…

This exercise integrates the infrared unknown identification ("IR-ID") experiment common to most organic laboratory syllabi with computer molecular modeling. In this modification students are still required to identify unknown compounds from their IR spectra, but must additionally match some of the absorptions with computed frequencies they…

The strong-inference protocol puts into action the important concepts in Platt's often-assigned, classic paper on the strong-inference method (10). Yet, perhaps because students are frequently performing experiments with known outcomes, the protocols they write as undergraduates are usually little more than step-by-step instructions for performing…

Evaluation tools are provided that help students' peer-assessment and self-assessment in group activities for the laboratories and classroom. The self- and peer-evaluations have helped teachers provide better feedback to the students and feel more confident in assigning each individual a grade for their contribution to the group laboratory project.

This paper describes the effects of learning support on simulation-based learning in three learning models: experiment prompting, a hypothesis menu, and step guidance. A simulation learning system was implemented based on these three models, and the differences between simulation-based learning and traditional laboratory learning were explored in…

Active-learning strategies are increasingly being integrated into college-level science courses to make material more accessible to all students and to improve learning outcomes. One active-learning pedagogy, case-based learning (CBL), was developed as a way to both enhance engagement in the material and to accommodate diverse learning styles.…

The series of three sets of companion studies reported in this presentation addresses the need for seeking more effective outcomes from science laboratory experiences, which is indicated by conflicting outcomes of earlier reported research related to laboratory instruction at two different academic levels--grades 7-12 and beginning college. Four…

This document provides abstracts of 116 laboratory experiments/demonstrations currently being utilized in all areas of engineering education at 52 universities across the United States. (SL)

Reviews experiments performed in a mobile spectroscopy laboratory. (SL)