As students learn physics, they are often required to reason about the behavior of macroscopic and microscopic phenomena, and to synthesize prior knowledge from several different areas of physics to construct understanding of new ideas. This can be a tremendously difficult cognitive task for novice students, especially when the unfamiliar…

Students with poor spatial abilities experience a barrier to academic success early in the STEM curriculum. However, Sorby et al. report that even brief training can improve spatial reasoning in students who lack them. Further, the National Research Council recommends that spatial thinking skills be taught at all educational levels. Halpern…

This paper takes a policy-analytical perspective on the evolution of standards of research information (RI) and provides a framework for analysing processes of RI standardisation in different research systems. It focuses on the choice of policy instruments on the macro level (government) and their effects with regard to policy reactions, decisions…

In many social science college courses, professors cover a wide variety of topics that may act as triggers for victims of trauma in both traditional and online courses. At the same time, we may also encounter students who suffer trauma during their college experience. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of creating a safe and…

Concept maps can be used in undergraduate biology as ways to visually communicate the relationships among things and events. One strength of concept mapping is that there is not just a single, correct way to compose one, given a list of particular concepts. Nevertheless there seem to be associations among ideas that are expressed frequently while…

Despite the fundamental importance of plants to our very survival, student interest in plant biology is in decline as technology draws us further away from nature. Here we introduce "Plant Tracer" (http://www.planttracer.com), a Matlab-based program, which can quantify time-lapse videos of plant movement. We demonstrate that Plant Tracer…

We investigate conditions in which novices make some reference errors when programming. We asked students from introductory programming courses to perform a simple code-writing task that required constructing references to objects and their attributes. By experimentally manipulating the nature of the attributes in the tasks, from identifying…

It is common to think of learning as the acquisition of knowledge by an individual learner. Starting a century ago, Lev Vygotsky developed a different perspective on learning, initiating a tradition of educational research whose momentum and influence continue to grow. One of Vygotsky's key principles is the "general genetic law of cultural…

Questions of how to support students in conversation across and about different perspectives regularly appear in discussions about civic engagement. Students with clear political positions and a desire to engage with political institutions, however, are themselves a rarified group on many campuses. The gulf between students who seek to engage…

This study was an examination of the systemization of, and law and ethics concepts incorporated into, robotics and computer science courses that offered artificial intelligence as part of the curriculum of selected community colleges. The researcher completed a mixed-methods study using surveys and document analysis. The first area of…

Drawing upon 90 in-depth interviews with medical educators and students from humanities, social sciences, and biomedical backgrounds at 37 medical schools, curricular and institutional data from an exhaustive set of all 137 MD-granting institutions, and observational data from national pedagogical meetings on medical education, I present findings…

A new Pew Research Center survey finds that many Americans can answer at least some questions about science concepts -- most can correctly answer a question about antibiotics overuse or the definition of an "incubation period," for example. But other concepts are more challenging; fewer Americans can recognize a hypothesis or identify…

This chapter provides an overview on how the use of Virtual Reality apps and related activities enhanced student learning in conjunction with a low-tech, team-based, active learning assessment. Our approach for integrating emerging immersive technology in a Cell Biology class, a first of its kind at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, was…

Citizen science is an emerging approach to conducting research in the National Parks System. As National Parks work to cultivate stewards for the parks' second century, this strategy may support scientific efforts while educating, engaging, and connecting participants with parks. Citizen science enlists the public in elements of the research…

This research is aimed to validate an instrument, the Malaysian version of ROSE or MROSE to gauge Malaysian secondary students' interests, attitudes, values, and priorities in S&T-related issues. Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling approach was used to evaluate the validity and reliability of the instrument. The internal…