Higher education has evolved in ways that may increase the challenges life science faculty face in providing accommodations for students with disabilities. Guided by Expectancy-Value Theory, we interviewed 34 life sciences faculty instructors from institutions nationwide to explore faculty motivation to create disability-inclusive educational…

There is widespread misuse of statistics in research, particularly in the life sciences, which is one of the contributing factors to reproducibility concerns in research. However, the formal quantitative training that life sciences research trainees receive is often quite limited. Our survey of statistics requirements in undergraduate life…

Within the scope of this investigation, educational instruments grounded on materialist ontology were employed to undertake a semantic analysis of the concepts of cell and the mechanisms of living organisms as they appear in biology and natural science textbooks. Drawing upon the ontological categories applied to distinct biological system levels,…

This manuscript builds on a novel, automatic, freely-available Bayesian approach to extract information in abstracts and titles to classify research topics by quartile. This approach is demonstrated for all N= 149,129 ISI-indexed publications in biological sciences journals during 2017. A Bayesian multinomial inverse regression approach is used to…

Cornell University has long offered a Calculus for Life Sciences course. In this case study, we report on how a team of pure mathematicians has modernized both the content and teaching methods of this course. The content went from a standard calculus course with few genuine applications in the life sciences to a course focusing on dynamical…

The ways in which children and adolescents become interested in science have been well studied. However, little is known from a lifespan perspective about how this process continues from childhood through adulthood. This cross-national study builds an understanding of doctoral students in the sciences in the Chile and the United States and how…

The goal of the study was to compare how visual representations were integrated into the contents of the U.S. and Turkish textbooks used in life science. Data was collected from 6th, 7th, and 8th grade middle school topics common to both countries. Content analysis was used to analyse visual representations in textbooks. The visual representations…

In response to the growing computational intensity of the healthcare industry, biomedical engineering (BME) undergraduate education is placing increased emphasis on computation. The presence of substantial gender disparities in many computationally intensive disciplines suggests that the adoption of computational instruction approaches that lack…

Laboratory practicals in life science subjects are traditionally assessed by written reports that reflect disciplinary norms for documenting experimental activities. However, the exclusive application of this assessment has the potential to engage only a narrow range of competencies. In this study, we explored how multiple modes of laboratory…

Background: The role of career interventions and their impact on students' sense of self and preparation for careers in STEM fields is an underexplored teaching and research area within STEM education. Purpose: The purpose of our mixed-methods study was to examine how a life sciences career exploration course at a large public research university…

Background: Students from low-socioeconomic status backgrounds (LSES) are underrepresented in STEM education, including in the biological sciences. As one of the foundational STEM disciplines, biology represents an interesting case study in that women earn the most undergraduate degrees, a trend that holds across racial/ethnic groups. However,…

The ability to do inquiry does not necessarily translate to understandings about scientific inquiry or the processes by which scientific knowledge is generated. The study reported in this paper focuses on what students know about scientific inquiry and what impact school science may have on this knowledge. We investigated grade 12 physical and…

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has upended the educational system worldwide, possibly with severe long-term consequences as most training institutions were forced to move to an online environment. Given the sudden transition to remote education, the main objective of this contribution is to evaluate the impact of distance education on examination…

Metabolism is a challenging subject for bioscience students due to the intrinsic complexity of the metabolic network, as well as that of the overlapping mechanisms of metabolic regulation. Collaborative learning based on a problem-based learning approach can help students to successfully learn and understand metabolism. In the present article, we…

The Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) melting assay intends to evaluate the unfolding, denaturation process of DNA secondary structures, and its stabilization using compounds known as DNA binders, some of which are highly specific for G-quadruplex DNAs versus duplex DNAs. First, students determined the melting temperature (T[subscript m])…