Welcome to the Virtual Analytical Laboratory or VAL! This is an on-line resource designed by staff in the School of Allied Health Sciences at De Montfort University. This resource is intended to help students on bioscience and laboratory-based degree programmes to gain essential laboratory skills, whether they are new to the university and have never been in a lab before, or whether they are returning to year 2 or 3 and are a bit rusty.
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh 16-17 June 2009 The aim of this national conference is to bring together practitioners in the teaching of science disciplines in HE to share their experiences, identify common challenges and an opportunity to share effective practice. The programme will include keynote lectures; short oral presentations; hands on workshops; posters and exhibitions.
There is a major mismatch between opportunity and action in most education systems today. It revolves around what is meant by "science education," a term that is incorrectly defined in current usage. Rather than learning how to think scientifically, students are generally being told about science and asked to remember facts. This disturbing situation must be corrected if science education is to have any hope of taking its proper place as an essential part of the education of students everywhere.
The SFES model appears both promising and challenging (see diagram, left). SFES in university and college science departments have the potential to drive science education reform at K-12 and postsecondary institutions. Our data suggest that science education would benefit from (i) increased training opportunities to develop SFES, (ii) reduced professional isolation for SFES, and (iii) improved academic infrastructure to support SFES research and professional activities. Attention to the issues raised by SFES in this study would likely strengthen the impact of SFES on K-12 science education, undergraduate science education, and science education research within the disciplines.
RAE 2008 can be criticised on several grounds but perhaps the most significant is that it is based on a view of universities that is 20 years out of date.
SciVee allows scientists to communicate their work as a multimedia presentation incorporated with the content of a peer-reviewed article. SciVee is operated in partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) an