The efficacy of different science and chemistry courses for science-major and non-major students, and the question of chemistry's contribution to general education are evaluated. Chemistry and science curriculum are too profession- and consumer-oriented, and to overcome this problem, it is advised that all disciplines must incorporate the major…

Students in the general chemistry course are advised to scrutinize data obtained by gas chromatograph (GC) for segregation, and mass spectroscopy (MS) for recognizing combination of group 6 transition-metal carbonyl compounds. The GC-MS method arouses students' interest, as it can be applied to real-world situations, such as the routine…

The aim of this paper is to examine the current state of development of Maori science curriculum policy, and the roles that various discourses have played in shaping these developments. These discussions provide a background for suggestions about a possible future direction, and the presentation of a new concept for Maori science education (note…

Reading the average science textbook, one is struck with a question: Why would people devote their lives to the study of a subject as dry as the Sahara Desert? Students in science classes only need to be let in on the great secret of science. It is fun and full of the stuff in page-turner novels--intrigue, mystery, romance, and sometimes just dumb…

The physicist Edward Teller once gave an interview to a woman from a popular science magazine. He began the interview by saying, "You have heard many bad things about the Hydrogen Bomb. Now I am going to tell you some nice things about it." In reflecting upon a response to Dr. Randy Moore, the author thought of Teller, seeing his role here in…

In the course of a project to create physics education materials for secondary schools in the USA we have, not surprisingly, had insights into how students develop certain mathematical understandings. Some of these translate directly into the mathematics classroom. With our materials, students get data from a variety of sources, data that arise in…

Of concern is an international trend of students' increasing reluctance to choose science courses in both their final years of secondary school and tertiary levels of education. Research into the phenomenon indicates an influencing factor to be the "uninteresting curriculum" (OECD, 2006) of school science. This article presents an…

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…

"Teenagers' abstract thinking ability test" was designed in accordance with the structure and performance of teenagers' ability to think abstractly. 138 Chinese junior high school students who learned New curriculum and old curriculum separately were measured. A comparison between the two kinds of students shows that abstract thinking…

With increased emphasis on state standards and assessments in science, one might question whether there is still a role for national science standards and benchmarks. This article makes a case for the importance of national guidelines and identifies key functions performed by the National Research Council's "National Science Education Standards"…

Attitudes to science scales developed earlier in England have been used in and around a Pakistan city with children in Primary/Elementary Grades 4-8. The limitations of a "transferred scale" in a culturally different context are apparent in a failure to reproduce the English factor patterns, but items are identified to serve as a base…

This study reports findings from an analysis of the 2002 Chinese National Physics Curriculum Guidelines and the alignment between the curriculum guidelines and two most recent provincial-level 12th-grade exit examinations in China. Both curriculum guidelines and test content were represented using two-dimensional matrices (i.e., topic by level of…

This paper questions the perceived divide between "science" subject matter and "moral" or "ethical" subject matter. A difficulty that this assumed divide produces is that science teachers often feel that there needs to be "special treatment" given to certain issues which are of an ethical or moral nature and which are "brought into" the science…

Along with the need to make their curriculum more comprehensive and reflective of the national and state standards, one school district also searched for ways to make students more passionate about learning science. As a result, they developed a new integrated science course that is centered around the environmental and Earth sciences with an…

Considerable effort has been made over the past decade to address the needs of learners in large urban districts through scaleable reform initiatives. We examine the effects of a multifaceted scaling reform that focuses on supporting standards based science teaching in urban middle schools. The effort was one component of a systemic reform effort…