A historical analysis reveals that the journal has become increasingly the organ of college and university science educators, fewer women now contribute articles, and that Dewey's focus on reflective thinking and problem solving has continued to appeal to science educators. (CP)

The research described in this paper leads to an instructional design approach which is an alternative to the consideration of such issues as mathematical skills or level of cognitive development. The approach uses an analysis of traditional instructional tasks to specify the underlying cognitive processes and structures necessary for the…

Physics learning studies demonstrate that students' pre-instructional world knowledge is often logically antagonistic to the principles of Newtonian mechanics taught in introductory physics courses. Under these conditions psychological theory predicts that learning will be inhibited, a prediction consistent with both the experiences of physics…

Describes a study investigating the combined effect of certain variables on student achievement in classical mechanics. The purpose was to (1) describe preinstructional knowledge and skills; (2) correlate these variables with the student's success in learning classical mechanics; and (3) develop hypothesis about relationships between these…

This paper describes a model for the adolescent's understanding of the motion of objects, and the application of this model to the design of beginning physics instruction in mechanics. Students' difficulties in learning classical Newtonian mechanics are described and integrated into current cognitive science research. Research findings on physics…

Teachers in elementary schools, supervisors of instruction, and other educational practitioners are the primary audience for this publication. The paper presents philosophical, psychological, and practical reasons for including a problem-solving approach in elementary school instruction. It draws on the writings of John Dewey, Jean Piaget, James…

The existence, before any formal physics instruction, of schemata which lead to an idiosyncratic interpretation of real world events, which physicists see as exemplifying principles of physics, is now well established. Because these interpretations are often at variance with physicists' interpretations, they have been labeled, among others,…