Daphnia have been used to demonstrate the physiological effects of stimulants such as caffeine and energy drinks in activities designed for secondary school and college labs. We describe how these activities were enhanced by coupling a microscope to a video recording device and digital data recording system to facilitate more accurate quantification of the rate of heartbeats in daphnia. Also, the technology facilitates measurements of the changes in the size of the heart due to the effect of stimulants. We describe the setup for the video recorder, data acquisition system, and microscope, the results obtained, and how these activities could be replicated in a secondary school laboratory setting to increase student engagement and be used as a primer to enhance learning and understanding of biological systems by students. This work aligns with the Next Generation Science Standards, in that students “use a variety of equipment and software to enter, process, display, and communicate information in different forms using text, tables, and pictures.”
The major focus of this ethnographic study is devoted to exploring the confluence of global and local referents of science education in the context of an urban chemistry laboratory classroom taught by a first-generation Filipino-American male teacher. This study investigates encounters between the teacher and four second-generation immigrant female students of color, as well as encounters among the four students. The pervasive spread of neoliberal ideology of accountability and sanctions both globally and locally, particularly in public high schools in the Bronx, New York City fuel situations for teaching and learning science that are encoded with the referents of top-down control. In the face of theses challenges, classroom participants must become aware of productive ways to build solidarity and interstitial culture across salient social boundaries, such as age, gender, ethnicity and role, to create and sustain successful teaching and learning of chemistry. Empirical evidence for solidarity was guided by physical and verbal displays of synchrony, mutual focus, entrainment, and emotional energy, body gestures, and prosody markers. This study shows that classroom participants used a combination of prosody markers to appropriate resources to decrease breaches in face-to-face encounters and, at the same time, create and sustain participation and solidarity to successfully complete an acidbase experiment.
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