Teachers know what a daunting job it can be to ensure that all students in a class learn effectively. In addition to the usual difficulties of gaining everyone's attention at once, instructors also run into the issue of preferred learning styles. In any classroom environment, the same topic is taught to multiple students, and each student may…

We report on the development of a middle school life sciences inquiry module, Sensing the Environment. This "data-enriched" inquiry module includes a series of activities exploring the nature of science, photosynthesis, transpiration, and natural selection, which culminates in students' querying authentic environmental data to support a scientific…

Today there are little more of 3 million chemist all over the world producing about 800,000 papers a year. They produce new substances--from some hundreds in 1800 to about 20 million now--the vast majority artificial. This rate is growing quite fast. Once the majority of chemistry teachers all over the world used textbooks as the main (sometimes…

The combination of mathematical and conceptual difficulties makes teaching quantum physics at secondary schools a precarious undertaking. With many of the conceptual difficulties being unavoidable, simplifying the mathematics becomes top priority. The particle/wave-in-a-box provides a teaching model which includes many aspects of serious …

In this descriptive case study, project-based learning is presented as a teaching model that combines elements from other learning strategies. High school students participating in an intertidal monitoring project built around this model increased their content knowledge related to the ecology of the intertidal zone and improved their scientific…

Since the World Conference on Higher Education organized by UNESCO in 1998, higher educational institutions around the world have been called upon to produce educators (teachers) who are able to motivate their learners to: (1) develop an awareness about, and a valid understanding of the Nature of Science (NOS); and (2) relate such knowledge to the…

As teachers' knowledge determines to a large extent how they respond to educational innovation, it is necessary for innovators to take this knowledge into account when implementing educational changes. This study aimed at identifying patterns in the content and the structure of science teachers' knowledge, at a point in time when they still had…

Researchers are becoming aware of the influence of students' presuppositions in directing their construction of science concepts. When these are entrenched and drastically nonscientific, they predispose the children to alternative explanatory frameworks that are inhibiting, especially in a knowledge domain such as genetics. In this study, we…

As both classroom teaching practice and literature show, many students have difficulties learning science concepts such as density. Here are some investigations that identify the relationship between density and floating through experimenting with successive dilution of a liquid, or the systematic change of concentration of a saltwater solution.…

The purpose of this study was to integrate technology and team-teaching techniques into science teacher education method courses in order to explore the effects of such integration on preservice teachers. The participants included one instructor and a total of 42 preservice teachers. A technology team-teaching model (TTT) was designed in this…

In this article we present details of a four-step constructivist-based teaching strategy, which helps students understand the dissolution of a gas in a liquid. The model derived from Ayas (1995) involves elicitation of pre-existing ideas, focusing on the target concept, challenging students' ideas, and applying newly constructed ideas to similar…

The author advocates science teaching that fosters curiosity, inquiry, and hands-on experience. (Condensed from "Virginia Journal of Education," May 1981, p13-15.) (Editor/SJL)

In this article, the authors describe an integrated science and literacy instructional model in which students build background knowledge by engaging in free-choice learning options during an investigation of school yard habitats. Students interact with their peers while inquiring, discussing findings, and using print resources to enhance learning.

In this course, students encounter reactions and mechanisms in the context of landmark syntheses of biologically important molecules. Students closely examine pairs of syntheses of related or identical molecules to facilitate their appreciation for synthetic strategy. They then write short, creative papers that critically compare the two synthetic…

Science education reform has four major goals: (1) science for all; (2) teaching for understanding and application of science knowledge and processes; (3) inclusion of broader views of science in the curriculum; and (4) less is better. Focuses on teaching for understanding and application of science, and recommends using an embedded assessment…