Background: Around the world, efforts are underway to include engineering design as part of elementary science instruction. A common rationale for those efforts is that Engineering Design-based Science Teaching (EDST) is a productive pedagogical approach for developing students’ understanding of core science concepts. Effectively utilizing EDST requires that teachers develop design activities that are highly connected to science content so that students can apply and expand their understanding of relevant concepts. In this study, we examine how a group of elementary (grades 3–5) pre-service and in-service teachers incorporated EDST into their planned science instruction. Those teachers were participants in a professional development project aimed at supporting EDST. We examine the ways that participants used EDST, the extent to which engineering design activities were connected to science concepts, and factors associated with those connections.Results: Most of the participants in the study developed science units in which an engineering design activity was placed at the end of the unit. Approximately half of those design activities lacked connections to the science concepts in the unit; they were typically related to the topic of the science unit, but did not require the use or development of key science ideas. Eleven percent of participants developed engineering activities with deep connections to science concepts, and 35% developed activities with shallow connections. No differences were found between life science, physical science, and earth/space science units in terms of the extent of conceptual connections. However, we did find that participants who utilized and adapted published engineering curriculum materials rather than make them from scratch were more likely to have unit plans with higher levels of conceptual connections.Conclusions: Our findings suggest that elementary teachers need additional support in order to effectively utilize EDST in their classrooms. Even within the context of a supportive professional development project, most of the engineering activities developed by our participants lacked substantial connections to the science concepts in their unit plans. Our findings highlight the value of high-quality curriculum materials to support EDST as well as the need to further expand the curriculum resources that are available to elementary teachers.

As online courses become increasingly common at the college level, an ongoing concern is how to ensure academic integrity in the online environment. One area that has received particular attention is that of preventing cheating during unproctored online exams. In this study, we examine students’ behavior during unproctored exams taken in an online introductory biology course. A feature of the learning management platform used for the course gave us the ability to detect cheating behavior involving students leaving the test page and viewing other material on their computers. This allowed us to determine what proportion of students cheated and examine the efficacy of various measures to mitigate cheating. We also explored the relationship between cheating behavior and exam performance. We found that 70% of students were observed cheating, and most of those who cheated did so on the majority of test questions. Appealing to students’ honesty or requiring them to pledge their honesty were found to be ineffective at curbing cheating. However, when students received a warning that we had technology that could detect cheating, coupled with threats of harsh penalties, cheating behavior dropped to 15% of students. Unexpectedly, we did not find evidence that students’ exam performance changed when their cheating behavior changed, indicating that this common form of cheating might not be as effective as students, or their instructors believe it to be.