The article shines light upon the differences in the vocabulary demands of academic spoken discourse between three broad scientific disciplines: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences. By employing the Academic Word List (AWL) and British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) wordlist, the present study…

This paper utilizes the concept of 'discriminate biopower' to explore how advancements in social and behavioral genomics might inform the racially exclusionary nature of one of the most inequitable and academically coveted environments in American public education: gifted education. In its birth, gifted education became a mechanism for regulating…

The call to increase student interest in science and related careers continues to receive national attention in the United States. While many current efforts have focused on infrastructure support and innovative pedagogies to better reach and engage students, research suggests that having a career role model can influence adolescents' interest in…

Society and education are inherently ableist. Disabled people are routinely excluded from education, or have poorer outcomes within educational systems. Improving educational experiences and outcomes for people of color has required educators to design antiracist curricula that explicitly address racial inequality. Here, we explore parallel…

Undergraduate research experiences provide engaging learning opportunities but are often not formally assessed for gains in knowledge and skills. This study examined undergraduate research assessment practices and the implementation of a satisfactory/unsatisfactory (S/U) research course in all academic units within a college of agricultural and…

Quality mentoring promotes graduate student success. Despite an abundance of practical advice, empirical evidence regarding how to match mentees and mentors to form quality mentoring relationships is lacking. Here, we examine the influence of variables theorized to predict mentorship support and quality in a national sample of 565 science doctoral…

Physics teachers around the world are trying to create classroom environments that would allow life science students to be more intrinsically motivated in their work. These efforts include, among others, matching classroom activities to students' interests as well as structurally variable activities to match different student abilities. While…

A classic, life science-themed fluid dynamics scenario is blood flow through a constriction. Physics teachers traditionally ask students if the pressure experienced by the blood in the constriction is greater, lesser, or the same as before the constriction. The conventional approach to resolving this question calls upon the equation of continuity,…

In higher education, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements are texts written by faculty members which explain their commitments to improving education for marginalized students. Requesting, reviewing, and acting upon DEI statements is just one practice, among others, which higher education institutions can use to transform individual…

Teachers' conceptions of teaching play a key role in the pedagogical practices they apply in their teaching. Previous studies of conceptions of teaching generic skills have been mainly qualitative with small samples, and thus there is a need for a more extensive quantitative study. This study investigates the associations between higher education…

Transforming an observable phenomenon into a tractable model is a challenging process, from determining the appropriate modeling scale to making realistic simplifying assumptions. However, many modeling texts are anchored around problems that have already been synthesized into a digestible format, which inhibits an opportunity to engage students…

This paper introduces a course design for a post-Calculus undergraduate course on mathematical modeling for the life sciences. The course includes differential equations, discrete, and cellular automata approaches (among others) to modeling questions in the life sciences, as well as a variety of biological topics. The course focuses on model…

Purpose: The globalisation of higher education has created new challenges for educators to remain dynamic in teaching science undergraduates with diverse cultural backgrounds. The current study explores this challenge by evaluating the different personal factors among biosciences and pharmacy undergraduates that affect their learning approaches as…

Images, such as photographs and diagrams, play an important role in the teaching and learning of science. To optimize student learning, educational science images should be designed to facilitate the cognitive processes relevant to comprehension. One such process is comparison, which involves aligning multiple representations on the basis of their…

Images, such as photographs and diagrams, play an important role in the teaching and learning of science. To optimize student learning, educational science images should be designed to facilitate the cognitive processes relevant to comprehension. One such process is comparison, which involves aligning multiple representations on the basis of their…