General Science Course Research Articles

Online Versus in the Classroom: Student Success in a Hands-On Lab Class

This study compares learning success of online and on-campus students in a general education soil science course with lab and field components. Two terms of students completed standardized pre- and postassessments designed to test knowledge and skills from the lecture and lab content of the course. There was no difference in overall grade or lab assignment grades between course formats. Online students outperformed on-campus students on the preassessment in the first term and on the post-assessment in the second term; the two populations scored the similarly for the other assessments. Online students showed a 42% grade improvement from pre- to post-assessment; on-campus students had a 21% improvement. Online students also showed better learning success in lab-related knowledge and skills based on individual assessment questions. The students in both populations successfully met the learning objectives for this lab- and field-based science course.

Using Conceptests to Assess and Improve Student Conceptual Understanding in Introductory Geoscience Courses

Conceptests are higher-order multiple-choice questions that focus on one key concept of an instructor's major learning goals for a lesson. When coupled with student interaction through peer instruction, conceptests represent a rapid method of formative assessment of student understanding, require minimal changes to the instructional environment and introduce many of the recognized principles of effective teaching that enhance student learning. In this study, instructors from several different institutions developed over 300 conceptests for the geosciences. These instructors then used this suite of concept questions in a wide range of classroom settings, including large introductory general education Earth Science courses for non-majors at open enrollment institutions, smaller physical geology classes suitable for majors at private colleges, and in introductory geology laboratory settings. Results of pre- and post-class Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) testing and qualitative feedback from students and instructors showed that conceptests increased attendance, improved student satisfaction, and enhanced student achievement. Participating instructors found implementation of conceptests into their classes straightforward and required less than 30 minutes of preparation per class. The conceptest question database is available on-line for geoscience instructors.

Avatars of Hollywood in Physical Science

This paper reports the results of the initial phase of an ambitious project known as Physics in Films, designed to help improve public understanding of the basic principles of physical science that the authors have embarked upon. The project began with several large groups of nonscience majors enrolled in the general education physical science course at the University of Central Florida (UCF), a course with a counterpart in nearly every college and university (and many high schools) in the nation.

Effect of conceptual change approach accompanied with concept mapping on understanding of solution concepts

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of conceptual change texts accompanied with concept mapping instruction, compared to traditional instruction (TI), on 8th grade students’ understanding of solution concepts and their attitudes toward science as a school subject. Solution Concept Test was developed as a result of examination of related literature and interviews with teachers regarding their observations of students’ difficulties. The test was administered to a total of 64 eighth grade students from two classes of a general science course, taught by the same teacher. The experimental group received the conceptual change texts accompanied with concept mapping in a lecture by the teacher. This instruction explicitly dealt with students’ misconceptions. It was designed to suggest conditions in which misconceptions could be replaced by scientific conceptions and new conceptions could be integrated with existing conceptions. The control group received TI in which the teacher provided instruction through lecture and discussion methods. The results showed that conceptual change text accompanied with concept mapping instruction caused a significantly better acquisition of scientific conceptions related to solution concept and produced significantly higher positive attitudes toward science as a school subject than the TI. In addition, logical thinking ability and prior learning were strong predictors for the concept learning related to solution.

Iconic programming for flowcharts, java, turing, etc

One of the largest barriers to learning programming is the precise and complex syntax required to write programs. This barrier is a key impediment to the integration of programming into the core curriculum of general high school science courses - there is not enough time to learn both syntax and programming in a three-week course module. The newly developed "Iconic Programmer" allows executable programs to be written through mouse clicks and menus, includes symbol by symbol translation into Java and Turing, and comes complete with a three-week lesson plan suitable to new programmers. To date, the new tool has been used effectively with full-semester, introductory programming courses at both the university and high school level.

Interdisciplinary Environmental Education: Communicating and Applying Energy Efficiency for Sustainability

This article demonstrates that interdisciplinary alliances on environmental education projects can effectively address the gap between complex environmental problems in the real world and disciplinary curricula in a university. We describe an alliance between an advanced communication course and a general science course wherein we addressed interconnections of energy efficiency, economics, and global climate change with respect to their impact on individuals, local businesses, and society. This project established that an interdisciplinary environmental project focused on local solutions to global problems is both a valuable learning tool for students and an effective method of accelerating the application of appropriate technologies.[environmental communication, environmental education, interdisciplinary, sustainability]

What to teach? What is learned? Astronomy as an amalgam of new and old

The tension between contemporary astronomy and traditional topics as subjects for general astronomy courses or fundamental science courses is healthy, but one must worry if either type crowds out the other. Too often only topics understood hundreds of thousands of years ago (such as gravity, tides, phases, and seasons) take up such a large fraction of the astronomy content that few or none of the fascinating and important discoveries of recent centuries not to mention recent years or months are included. I discuss aspects of this problem. Including topics of contemporary interest often motivates students to concentrate their attention and study time on the entire range of topics in the course. Practitioners of the new field of Astronomy Education Research seem often to attack their subject in perpendicular fashion to the methods of practitioners of communicating astronomy to the public. I also discuss some of the content of our International Astronomical Union's Commission on Education and Development's special session from 2003 on Effective Teaching and Learning of Astronomy , and of the forthcoming volume of the same title to be published by Cambridge University Press. I further discuss the role of inspiring events, such as George Ellery Hale's inspiration from the 1882 transit of Venus and the potential from the widespread observation of the 2004 transit of Venus and of solar eclipses.

Acceptance of the R.A.F. Penrose Gold Medal for 2002 R.A.F. Penrose Gold Medal for 2002

Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen: The first thought of everyone when they are told that they have won an award such as the Penrose Medal is, why me? And the initial exhilaration is soon tempered by the realization that it’s a matter of having had the luck to have been on the right list at the right time, and of having had good friends to have put one there. And by good friends, I mean the generations of teachers, colleagues, and students whose stimulation is so important in the development of any scientist. I would like to acknowledge my teachers, my colleagues, and the Department of Geology of the University of Toronto, and above all, my students and research associates, for without them I wouldn’t be standing here today. When I look back, I’m a little red-faced to remember the reason I took up geology. I went up to Cambridge to become a chemist. To achieve this one has to take a two-year general science course, followed by one year of specialization. For me this meant chemistry, physics, and another course in each …

How to Teach Biology Using the Movie Science of Cloning People, Resurrecting the Dead, and Combining Flies and Humans

While popular culture is generally acknowledged to have some impact on public opinion of science, attempts to evaluate this relationship have focused largely on how the public perceives science, rather than how well they understand it. Movies, television, and literature are usually argued to foster a negative perception of science and scientists among the viewing and reading public. What has been left out of this analysis, however, is the degree to which popular culture informs or misinforms the public about how science is done. Does the scientific accuracy and plausibility of a movie’s story line really affect the public’s understanding of the related science? As a science researcher, I am biased in my belief that realistic movies provide more engaging and thought-provoking entertainment than ones that violate obvious and well-understood scientific principles. However, whether realistic movies actually stimulate public inquiry into real science remains to be demonstrated. As a science teacher, I am also challenged to find ways to engage non-science students in learning about how and why science is done. To this end, I have developed a general science course called “Biology in the Movies, ” which uses biology-based movies as a starting point for discussing the fundamental ideas, techniques, and societal implications of such topics as human cloning, genetic screening, human origins and evolution, artificial intelligence, and recombining animals. Teaching this course has thus prompted me to consider the qualities of movies that make them useful for furthering public understanding of science. In this essay, I attempt to explain those qualities and explore how movies that treat similar scientific ideas with differing degrees of realism can be used to teach science. I close with comments on how movies can be usefully critiqued for their scientific plausibility.

Integrating Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment, and Evaluation in a Technology-Supported Genetics Learning Environment

This article describes an extended collaboration between a development team and an evaluation team working with GenScope, an open-ended exploratory software tool. In some respects, this was a routine evaluation, documenting substantial gains (of roughly 1 SD) in genetics reasoning ability in all but 1 of 17 classes, despite challenges presented by school computer-lab settings. Relative to matched comparison classes, larger gains were found in technical biology and general science courses but not in college prep or honors biology courses. In other respects, our effort illustrates the value of new views of assessment, technology, and research. The alignment of a sophisticated research assessment and simple classroom assessments shed light on initial failures, spurring revision. By refining the GenScope activities and extending the classroom assessments, we supported worthwhile whole-class discourse around the shared understanding of the software. A follow-up study in a laptop-equipped classroom yielded the absolute and relative gains (3.1 SD and 1.6 SD) that proponents of such innovations have long promised. In retrospect, the strengths and weakness of the study illustrate the value of newer “design-based” approaches to educational research.

Using Technology to Create a Scientific Learning Community

Roxbury Community College (RCC) is an urban, multicultural, two-year college in Boston with a large population of African-American and Hispanic students. Most of the entering students fail to meet minimal levels on standardized math and science tests. RCC has been involved in science and math education reform for more than ten years, in part because these standardized test results for incoming students indicate a lack of proficiency in science and math. The reform has taken two major approaches. The first was the introduction of a course in general science; the second was the introduction of undergraduate research.

Teaching the Nature of Science through Inquiry to Prospective Elementary Teachers: A Tale of Two Researchers

The teacher as researcher, Colburn, and the researcher, Bianchini, investigated Colburn's use of inquiry to teach the nature of science to prospective elementary teachers; we attempted to identify those aspects of the nature of science addressed through inquiry instruction and the varied contexts in which such insights arose. We began by videotaping small group inquiries and whole class deliberations during three units of Colburn's inquiry-oriented general science course. We then conducted separate qualitative analyses of the resulting 20 h of videotaped data. Colburn, the teacher and informant, adopted an emic perspective and employed examples of explicit and implicit deliberations and demonstrations of the nature of science to construct his case. Bianchini also used an emic perspective, but examined only what teacher and students explicitly identified as examples of and insights into the nature of science. Taken together, our analyses highlight the difficulties in presenting a cogent and comprehensive picture of the nature of science to students, the teacher's pivotal role in initiating discussions of what science is and how scientists work, and the strengths and limitations of using classroom-based research to investigate nature of science instruction. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 177–209, 2000

Lower track science students' argumentation and open inquiry instruction

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of open inquiry instruction with low achieving, marginalized high school students. Students with long histories of scholastic failure were asked to participate in question generation, experimental design, and argument construction as a part of their General Science course instruction. Videotapes were collected from daily science instruction, and entrance and exit instruction interviews were conducted using identical open-ended problems. From this dataset, comparisons were made between students' entrance and exit interview responses representing change over time. Shifts in student responses coincided with renegotiated classroom norms for scientific discourse. Results are reported for five students in the form of assertions. Students' arguments were observed to shift toward those more consistent with the nature of the scientific arguments including: (1) students' tentativeness of knowledge claims, (2) students' use of evidence, and (3) students' views regarding the source of scientific authority. Implications are discussed for research and practice in light of the national standards' call for universal scientific literacy. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 807–838, 2000

Turning liabilities into assets in a general education course

Debate concerning the content of the general education Computer Science course or the "Computer Literacy" course captures the interest and divides the opinion of the Computer Science community. This paper describes three of the typical difficulties (liabilities) that instructors of a general education course encounter and how instructors may capitalize on these difficulties to transform them into assets.

Physics on rollerblades

This paper describes how to connect the concepts of kinematics and dynamics with everyday life experience by using rollerblades in teaching mechanics. We describe seven experiments that were performed by the author while teaching general physics and science courses at Rutgers University.

The Impact of Developmental Instruction on Reflective Judgment

This study assessed reflectivity in undergraduates enrolled in general education environmental science courses by using the author’s Reflective Judgment-Developmental Instruction Model, based on Kitchener and King’s model, to help students examine their epistemic perspectives. The developmental instruction students had statistically significant higher reflective judgment change scores than traditional instruction students, suggesting that a purposefully structured one-semester intervention can result in epistemic development.

Active and group learning techniques and their use in graphics education

Student learning and the depth of the student's knowledge increase when active and group learning methods are employed in the classroom. Group learning has the additional benefit of preparing students for professional environments. Active and group learning strategies are discussed in general computer science course work and as applicable in the graphics class. Difficulties with active learning and techniques for dealing with these are also presented.

The knowledge most worth having: Otis W. Caldwell (1869?1947) and the rise of the general science course

In 1860 Herbert Spencer asked the famous rhetorical question ‘What Knowledge is of Most Worth?’ The unequivocal answer was science. Giving greater attention to science and scientific knowledge would not only produce additional scientists; more important, argued Spencer, it would make better parents, better church-goers, better citizens and workers, better artists and better consumers of art. It would lead to a ‘command of fundamental processes’, ‘worthy home membership’, ‘worthy use of leisure’, ‘ethical character’ — the goals of a general education spelled out by Spencerians within the National Educational Association in 1918. Here is our puzzle, then: how are we to interpret a definition of science, one widely accepted both in Spencer's time and in our own, that comes so close descriptively to a commonsensical view of what constitutes non-science? The answer to this question lies in part in the historical relationship between science and general education, a relationship established in the opening decades of this century, when the authority of science and scientific objectivity was in the minds of most educators unimpeachable. The high school general science course, developed in its early stages by the botanist and educator, Otis W. Caldwell, was a potent symbol of this new relationship. Organized around broad, topical issues and claiming to teach the mundane truths of life, general science was more than a loose collection of facts from the various earth, biological, and physical sciences. Its many advocates viewed the new unified science course as pedagogically independent of the specialties yet central to education in general. In 1949, two years after Caldwell's death, 72 percent of the total science enrollments in the United States were in general science and biology, its closest cognate. This paper examines the rise of the general science course and its implications for the reform of secondary school science education. It concludes that while recent reforms may impress students with the personal and social character of science, introducing them to a broad use of the scientific method, they will not necessarily make them more scientifically literate or train them to think about problems in anything like the way professional scientists do. Much less will they introduce students to alternative ways of problem-solving, arguably one of the most important goals of good science teaching.

The development of science process skills in authentic contexts

AbstractInstructional strategies and curriculum sequences aimed at teaching process skills have received considerable attention in science education. On the other hand, the teaching of domain‐independent, context‐free skills has been subject to criticism on the ground that important aspects of cognitive activities are functions of meaningful contexts. The intent of this study was to examine the development of integrated process skills in the context of open‐inquiry laboratory sessions. The data‐collection approach was qualitative and included videotapes of laboratory sessions, laboratory reports of students, and the reflective journals kept by the two teachers involved in the study. Forty‐eight students from the Grade 11 introductory physics course, 29 students from the Grade 12 physics course, and 60 students from the Grade 8 general science course from an all‐boys private school participated in the study. An interpretive research methodology was adopted for construction of meaning from the data. Students worked in collaborative groups during all of the open‐inquiry laboratory sessions. Findings from the study indicate that students develop higher‐order process skills through nontraditional laboratory experiences that provided the students with freedom to perform experiments of personal relevance in authentic contexts. Students learned to (a) identify and define pertinent variables, (b) interpret, transform, and analyze data, (c) plan and design an experiment, and (d) formulate hypotheses. Findings of this study suggest that process skills need not be taught separately. Integrated process skills develop gradually and reach a high level of sophistication when experiments are performed in meaningful context.

Predicting achievement of first semester university science students

This paper reports on 11 measures used as predictors of students' achievement in their first semester subjects. The students were enrolled in the same four core subjects of a university general science course. Although a number of statistically significant correlations were found, only one predictor variable, HSC aggregate mark, correlated significantly with each of the achievement variables. One predictor variable entered four of the achievement regression equations, while two variables entered the fifth, accounting for 34 to 54% of the variance. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A05A9011 00020