It is generally accepted that a robust science education includes knowledge of science, as well as knowledge "about" science, or, in other words, an understanding of the "Nature of Science." However, debates around what Nature of Science is and how to measure it are far from settled, and this compromises our ability to support…

Australia-wide consensus was reached on seven core concepts of physiology, which included homeostasis, a fundamental concept for students to understand as they develop their basic knowledge of physiological regulatory mechanisms. The term homeostasis is most commonly used to describe how the internal environment of mammalian systems maintains…

Consensus was reached on seven core concepts of physiology using the Delphi method, including "integration," outlined by the descriptor "cells, tissues, organs, and organ systems interact to create and sustain life." This core concept was unpacked by a team of 3 Australian physiology educators into hierarchical levels,…

The objective structured practical examination (OSPE) is a reliable assessment of practical skills in anatomy teaching. It is often administered as low-stake assessments to track progress at multiple time points in anatomy curricula. Standard-setting OSPEs to derive a pass mark and to ensure assessment quality and rigor is a complex task. This…

The physics that underpins modern technology is based on Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Most school students complete their compulsory science education without being taught any of these Einsteinian concepts. Only those who take a specialised physics course have the opportunity to learn modern physics. In 2011, the first…

The science teacher in the modern high school acts as the designer and driver of the in-class practice. In this role, the teacher must broadly assess the effect of the practice on the student. This would rely on accurate self-knowledge of how they act in class and impact their students. In this study we explore these issues by comparing the…

Although the benefits of addressing cognitive, social and affective aspects of learning in order to support conceptual change have been discussed in the literature, there are few studies of such interventions in the normal classroom. This study used a multidimensional conceptual change framework in order to teach five biology and physics topics…

Many examples exist in the chemical education literature of individual experiments, whole courses or even entire year levels that have been completely renewed under the tenets of context-based, inquiry-based or problem-based learning. The benefits of these changes are well documented and include higher student engagement, broader skill development…

The decline in students' interest in science and technology is a major concern in the western world. One approach to reversing this decline is to introduce modern physics concepts much earlier in the school curriculum. We have used the context of the recent discoveries of gravitational waves to test the benefits of one-day interventions, in which…

Scientific reasoning competencies are relevant science competencies and therefore the development of assessment instruments for scientific reasoning competencies has become an integral part of science education research. However, some authors have questioned the validity of the instruments available so far, since their psychometric quality has not…

This study investigates the relationship between performances on the speaking component of the TOEFL iBTTM with performances on academic oral assessment tasks. For the academic tasks, we recorded and transcribed the performances of five local and five high-achieving international undergraduate students on oral assessment tasks in core first-year…

Eighteen primary teachers across three conditions (Representational Fluency, Representational Agency, Comparison) received two days of training around an inquiry unit on plate tectonics replete with representations. The Representational Agency group also received training around the semiotic and material affordances of representations while the…

This article is a qualitative study, which was done in 2013-2014. In this study using a comparative study was conducted to compare physics curriculum elements of Iran with the countries studied. Countries studied: Singapore, Turkey, India, England and Australia have diverse educational system. In this study, the structure of the educational…

"Thinking Science" is a 2-year program of professional development for teachers and thinking lessons for students in junior high school science classes. This paper presents research on the effects of "Thinking Science" on students' levels of cognition in Australia. The research is timely, with a general capability focused on…

This article presents a case study of four academic scientists. These academics teach in the first year of a Bachelor of Science degree at a large research-focused Australian university that has demanded and supported a greater focus on undergraduate learning. Taken as a whole, the accounts of science that the first-year academics in this case…