Many studies have stressed students' lack of understanding of experiments in laboratories. Some researchers suggest that if students design all or parts of entire experiment, as part of an inquiry-based approach, it would overcome certain difficulties. It requires that a procedure be written for experimental design. The aim of this paper is to…

President Barack Obama recently issued a call for increased hands-on learning in U.S. schools in an address at the National Academy of Sciences. Obama concluded that the future of the United States depends on one's ability to encourage young people to "create, and build, and invent." In this article, the author discusses National Lab Day (NLD)…

Despite being criticised for placing little emphasis on thinking, the majority of laboratory work at school level is taught "via" expository "recipe-style" labs. This has been seen to result in students struggling to be able to apply the practical techniques they have learnt in the classroom outside the narrow environment in which they were…

We piloted an educational model, the Sustainable Agriculture Scholars Program, linking research in organic agriculture to experiential learning activities for summer undergraduate employees in 2007 and 2008. Our objectives were to: (1) further student understanding of sustainable agriculture research, (2) increase student interest in sustainable…

We describe a 10-week laboratory course of guided research experiments thematically linked by topic, which had an ultimate goal of strengthening the undergraduate research-teaching nexus. This undergraduate laboratory course is a direct extension of faculty research interests. From DNA isolation, characterization, and mutagenesis, to protein…

In the last decades, the technological and scientific evolution of the computing discipline has been widely affecting research in software engineering education, which nowadays advocates more enlightened and liberal ideas. This article reviews cross-disciplinary research on a computer architecture class in consideration of its switching to…

Augmented reality (AR) provides huge opportunities for online teaching in science and engineering, as these disciplines place emphasis on practical training and unsuited to completely nonclassroom training. This paper proposes a new concept in virtual and remote laboratories: the augmented remote laboratory (ARL). ARL is being tested in the first…

Do you have an idea for a new activity or laboratory exercise that you would like to incorporate into your course but feel unsure as to how it will be received by your students? This was our concern when developing first-year biology labs for a biology majors' course at University of Windsor. Through a Centred on Learning Innovation Fund (CLIF)…

Research on conceptual change assumes that students enter a science classroom with prior(mis-)conceptions. When being exposed to instruction, students are supposed to develop or change their conceptions to (more) scientific concepts. As a consequence, instruction typically concentrates on appropriate examples demonstrating that students'…

Although undergraduates have long held a role as teaching assistants for introductory science courses at liberal arts colleges and universities, educational institutions often do not provide these students with opportunities to explore science teaching and pedagogy. At Brandeis University, we designed an internship course to help increase the…

The present study aimed at finding the effectiveness of the Laboratory Training Model of Teaching (LTM) and comparing it with the traditional methods of teaching chemistry to seventh standard students. It strived to determine whether the (LTM) method in chemistry would be significantly more effective than the Traditional method in respect to the…

We describe a new approach to teaching introductory biology. Our introductory experience for undergraduates is a laboratory course that is entirely inquiry and discovery based. We introduce our students to fundamental concepts in biology in the framework of three multi-week laboratory modules, each of which is an open-ended investigation of a…

Reform-minded practices are widely encouraged during pre-service science teacher education in concert with national reform documents. This contrasts to the nature of instruction within university science laboratories in which pre-service teachers enrol, which are largely confirmatory in nature. Undergraduate science laboratories are taught…

Personalized medicine refers to medical care that involves genetically screening patients for their likelihood to develop various disorders. Commercial genome screening only involves identifying a consumer's genotype for a few single nucleotide polymorphisms. A phenotype (such as an illness) is greatly influenced by three factors: genes, gene…

At Chiba University, gross anatomy laboratory sessions ("laboratories") are required for physical therapy students. Though most physical therapy schools require their students to participate in laboratories so that they will better understand the structure of the human body, few data exist on the value of these laboratories specifically…