Written scientific communication, such as laboratory reports, are important components of undergraduate education within the sciences. Since most Horticultural Science majors offer lecture- and lab-based courses, students often write laboratory reports for many courses across the curriculum and these reports comprise a large percentage of the…

A new graduate chemistry course was introduced in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Alabama. The new course, CH584-Literature and Communication in Graduate Chemistry, replaced a second year graduate student literature seminar requirement. Course topics included chemical information resources, critical analysis, scientific writing,…

This study concerns different final thesis models in the research on teacher education in Europe and their orientation towards the academy and the teaching profession. In scientific journals, 33 articles support the occurrence of three models: the portfolio model, with a mainly teaching-professional orientation; the thesis model, with a mainly…

Recent efforts in the science education community have highlighted the need to integrate research and theory from science communication research into more general science education scholarship. These synthesized research perspectives are relatively novel but serve an important need to better understand the impacts that the advent of rapidly…

Advertising is everywhere: on television, on the internet, on billboards and in print media. It is important to be able to understand and process the advertising messages that we are bombarded with daily. Advertising frequently uses scientific information to make a product appear more credible or to underscore specific features or benefits.…

Understanding conflicts between sources is an inherent part of science text comprehension. We examined whether readers' memories for conflicts and their situational interpretation of conflicts would be affected by reading goals and lexical cue phrases that signal rhetorical relationships. To this end, 198 undergraduates read multiple documents on…

In response to an increased emphasis on disciplinary literacy in the secondary science classroom, an investigation of the literacy processes utilized by high school students while reading scientific text was undertaken. A think-aloud protocol was implemented to collect data on the processes students used when not prompted while reading a magazine…

The Unified English Braille (UEB) code has already been adopted by various countries. To inform the decision about UK adoption, a suite of research was carried out with UK braille readers and other stakeholders. Previous research indicates that readers of technical braille codes may be most affected by a move to UEB. In this study, six technical…

Open educational resources (OER) is a topic that has aroused increasing interest by researchers as a powerful contribution to improve the educational system quality and openness, both in face to face and distance education. The goal of this research is to map publications related to OER, dating from 2002 to 2013, and available through the Web of…

Translational research originated in the medical field during the 1990s to describe taking discovery based research through the steps of applying it to clinical research and patient-oriented care. This model is implicitly linear, depicting the flow of information from researchers' bench, to a clinical trial bedside, to a primary care physician's…

A logical question to be expected from students: "How could life develop, that is, change, evolve from simple, primitive organisms into the complex forms existing today, while at the same time there is a generally observed decline and disorganization--the second law of thermodynamics?" The explanations in biology textbooks relied upon by…

The aim of this study is to analyse the effect of tasks on the detection of explanation obstacles when secondary school students read scientific texts. Students were instructed to read short passages under different task conditions, and to ask questions if necessary. Obstacle detection was operationalised in terms of the type of questions asked by…

Science communication is a diverse and transdisciplinary field and is taught most effectively when the skills involved are tailored to specific educational contexts. Few academic resources exist to guide the teaching of communication with non-scientific audiences for an undergraduate science context. This mixed methods study aimed to explore what…

This article describes how second-grade students' literacy learning was enhanced as they used their developing knowledge of nonfiction in an integrated English language arts/science unit toward the creation of multimodal nonfiction science books. After explaining the Common Core State Standards that guided the unit, the author outlines the…

Epidemiology is the study of the distribution of disease in human populations. This means that authentically teaching primary data collection in epidemiology is difficult as students cannot easily access suitable human populations. Using an action research methodology, this paper studied the use of a virtual human population (called "The…