In recent years, some communities have experienced extreme conditions of drought: reduced water supply for farms, increased wildfires, and decreased water availability in reservoirs and groundwater basins. This article details how high school juniors in an environmental science course engaged in collaborative teams and with a municipal water conservation specialist to design possible ways to address community-based drought issues. This project provided students the opportunity to experience the design process through envisioning technologies or approaches to help their own community address a water shortage problem while considering environmental, social, and economic implications of their proposed solution. Students defined the problem by obtaining information from news articles, textual information, and conversations with the water specialist. Proposed solutions were evaluated and refined through a peer critique process and feedback from the water specialist. Specific strategies are presented to foster group members’ skill development in collaboration, reflection, productive critique/feedback, and revision of solutions. The project rubric is provided to illustrate a means to assess students’ consideration of relevant factors impacting their design solution. This project served as an authentic learning experience whereby student teams were selected to present their problem solutions to the Sustainability Committee of the local water company.

Direct experiences in the living world are a major ally in helping students understand biology and the practice of science, and in fostering a lifelong love for nature. The positive impact of field study on students’ experiences and outcomes, and the health and mental benefits of being outdoors, are supported by considerable literature. As a teacher at the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, I was inspired by my graduate experiences with the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), a consortium of institutions dedicated to the training of tropical biologists, to develop a field research biology curriculum for high school students that was enthusiastically embraced and well-remembered by my students. I provide specifics about the design of the curriculum, detail ways that biology teachers might adapt this curriculum to their own programs to the benefit of their students and make suggestions about overcoming practical obstacles. I hope to convince teachers and administrators that the value of implementing research-oriented field programs in secondary education far outweighs the necessary effort.

Collaborating effectively in small groups is an important skill for students, especially in classrooms adopting science education reforms like the NGSS, but it is also an extremely challenging skill. In this article, I share how I use group roles as a scaffold to help students collaborate productively and equitably. I discuss two types of roles and the strengths and limitations of each. Task-oriented roles, where students are assigned a role based on specific tasks they will complete, such as operating a timer, are very effective when students are doing an activity like a lab that requires several tasks to be done at the same time, but do not push students to meaningfully interact with their peers’ ideas. Process-oriented roles focus on different ways for students to engage with each other’s thinking, which supports collaborative sensemaking. In this article I share examples of each type of role, discuss when I use each type, and share logistics such as how I introduce and manage each type of role. Using group roles and attending to what purpose they serve within an activity has improved the quality of student collaboration in my classroom.

At its core, differentiation stems from the recognition that individual learners arrive in classrooms, each day, with a wide range of knowledge, lived experiences, abilities, ways of thinking, curiosities, and dispositions. Differentiation challenges us to think deeply about and make continual connections between who we teach, what we teach, how we teach, and a classroom culture of learning that supports this work. It is a philosophy of teaching and learning shaped by mindset and guided by five core practices that cohesively function to make learning work for the full range of students in our care. These practices include building a positive science learning community, designing rigorous and relevant science curriculum, teaching up by creating respectful and meaningful tasks, assessing and providing feedback persistently for growth, and utilizing flexible teaching and learning approaches that are responsive to individual and collective patterns in student (a) readiness, (b) interests, and (c) preferences in learning science.

This study aims to contribute to the growing body of research on the role of crosscutting concepts (CCCs) in three-dimensional (3D) teaching and learning by examining the complexity of elementary preservice teachers’ (PSTs) knowledge for teaching related to CCCs. The researchers used qualitative methods to analyze PSTs’ responses to a questionnaire about CCCs in 3D learning and think-aloud interviews with nine PSTs about this questionnaire. The PSTs’ responses suggested patterns and variations in their selection and justification of CCCs in relation to different classroom scenarios featuring distinct scientific phenomena and disciplinary core ideas. These analyses highlight how different individuals likely see different CCCs as having “exploratory power” for the related phenomena and DCIs. The findings suggest that the knowledge required for effective teaching of CCCs with SEPs and DCIs is complex and multifaceted. Overall, the study provides valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of elementary PSTs’ understanding of CCCs and the support required to integrate CCCs with SEPs and DCIs effectively. This study has significant implications for teacher educators who need to consider how to build on the initial knowledge that PSTs bring to facilitate the development of their knowledge and practice in support of 3D teaching and learning.

Students need a strong understanding of how to represent chemical compounds in order to succeed in organic chemistry. This project set out to gain a better understanding of students’ difficulties with symbolic representations, by identifying the specific errors associated with drawing wedge-dash structures. The focus was on how students transformed a condensed formula into a wedge-dash structure. The types of errors were coded and analyzed to determine the proportion of students making each type of error between the quiz, exam and final. These errors were connected to the skill of information processing to determine which category of information processing had the most improvement. Information processing is an important skill in any STEM discipline where students are required to understand and transform information into a different format.

Students come into the classroom with a variety of background knowledge. Therefore, it is imperative that educators are able to help all students, regardless of their familiarity with the content. Since it can be challenging for some large enrollment classes to schedule recitation classes after lecture due to logistical constraints, this study attempts to determine if there are differences in performance based upon when content is introduced first, recitation or lecture. This study found that students who were introduced to content in recitation before lecture typically scored statistically higher across three mid-term exams, in a first term general chemistry course. This difference in performance suggests that students who are introduced to content in recitation, versus simply hearing about a topic in lecture, might get more out of the lecture, thus leading to higher performance on exams. Students who are introduced to topics that are tested by way of definition-based questions or basic calculations benefit from being introduced to this content in recitation before lecture. However, when introducing more challenging and abstract chemistry topics, our results indicate it may benefit students to be introduced to these topics in lecture first, so they can begin developing their conceptual understanding in lecture.

Rising tuition rates across colleges and universities contribute to the mounting financial strain on students. In response to rising costs, literature details that students would seek to bolster their financial security by working additional hours per week, consequently leading to less available time. Previous studies have focused on the negative associations with GPA but not in-class points. We observed this relationship within a 77-student 200-level Genetics course and associated lab. Students working 20+ hours per week (59.7% of students) fared significantly worse on exams. These students scored significantly fewer total class points (p = 0.0089), exam points (p = 0.0255, p = 0.0028, p = 0.0311), and were more likely to incur a failed assignment sooner during the class than their counterparts (p = 0.0025). We observed these trends again in a 34-student 400-level Immunology validation cohort (p = 0.0032). These findings represent the first quantitative analysis of employment vs. numerical Biology exam and course scores. They are an important step towards identifying and treating the underlying factors associated with reduced STEM performance, retention, well-being, and represent a forewarning of an approaching higher education crisis as institutions seek to retain and support underrepresented students.

Movies have long been used for teaching in undergraduate science courses. However, embedding movie references (EMR) in science videos is a new trend. This study explored how EMR in YouTube science videos might affect the nature of comments and the process of learning science. Using constructivist grounded theory, we compared comments on two videos. Up and Atom’s (UA) video presented quantum tunneling conventionally, while Because Science’s (BS) video used Harry Potter to illustrate the same concept. Content analysis revealed that comments on UA’s video are more formal and focused on specific scientific concepts, while comments on BS’s video are more casual and diverse, engaging more broadly with science and the video topic. Although conventional science videos may facilitate knowledge exchange and collaborative learning in the comments, these comments may spread misinformation when they lack context, authority, and expertise. Yet, science videos EMR connect scientific concepts with popular culture, and offer unique learning opportunities, including critique, creative thinking, and self-reflection. We argue, however, that EMR in science videos risks diverting attention away from the science content.