The purpose of this paper is to report our findings from a qualitative study intended to develop our understandings of: what high-poverty urban children understand and believe about food and food systems; and how such children transform and use that knowledge in their everyday lives (i.e. how do they express their scientific literacies including…

Science education has a key role to play in helping people to develop their understanding of the local and global dimensions of food, farming and land management. Based on a review of the literature on what is known about young people's (3-19) views towards and learning about these topics, a research agenda is outlined for consideration by the…

In this study we investigated the impact of a teacher's interpretive authority on the content and conduct of discussions of poetry in two ninth-grade classes. Three authority conditions were examined: a condition in which the teacher taught a poem he had written, a condition in which the teacher taught a poem he had taught many times previously,…

Bennett et al. (2000) refer to the notion of 'core skills' as an 'unfulfilled concept' (p. 48). Thus it is possible that different interpretations and values at the level of actual degree programmes may be hidden within this term. This study enquires into students' tacit notions of skills development within a specific degree programme and at a…

What science-related knowledge is actually used by nurses in their day-to-day clinical reasoning when attending patients? The study investigated the knowledge-in-use of six acute-care nurses in a hospital surgical unit. It was found that the nurses mainly drew upon their professional knowledge of nursing and upon their procedural understanding…

We make five over-time comparisons of student knowledge of civics and government: a) knowledge among 4th, 8th, and 11/12th graders between 1975/6 and 1998 using two separate NAEP trend assessments; b) knowledge over the same period by comparing responses to individual items asked in the 1975/6 and 1981/2 assessments to responses on identical…

Science education has moved from the traditional lecture-and-demonstration model toward a student inquiry model. Inquiry activities allow students to discover many relationships of science for themselves. However beneficial this shift may be, former assessment methods used in the traditional model may no longer effectively determine student…

This study examined relations among cortisol reactivity and measures of cognitive function and social behavior in 4- to 5-year-old children (N=169) attending Head Start. Saliva samples for the assay of cortisol were collected at the beginning, middle, and end of an approximately 45-min testing session. Moderate increase in cortisol followed by…

The authors applied constructivist learning theory to environmental education to explore knowledge gains, student attitudes, and engagement among high school students exposed to a week-long unit on nonnative plant species. The authors compared constructivist and traditional teaching methods. Each class was given a pretest and a posttest. The…

When the author discovered that the majority of fifth-grade students in her classroom were comprehending very little in their social studies textbooks, she decided to revamp the methods and materials in order to help all students acquire the content. The textbook not only held new and abstract content, but also contained transition words,…

The article reports on a one-year AHRB-funded Innovations project that was designed to evaluate the usefulness, or otherwise, of the application of real-time visual feedback technology in the singing studio. The basis for the research was a multi-disciplinary approach that drew on voice science and acoustics, the psychology of singing and voice…

Recent advances in the medical management of HIV offer the potential for increased longevity, improved quality of life, and the treatment of HIV as a chronic, rather than terminal, illness. The advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has required the necessity of strict adherence to complex medication regimens. As a vital factor in…

This paper examines the evolutionary path of the university and its impact on the quality of education it provides to people, industry and society. The authors first analyse the (Kantian) paradigm of reason, the (German Idealists') paradigm of culture and the current dominant techno-bureaucratic paradigm of excellence. They then argue that the…

The current study examines the understanding of the DSM-IV-MR-J items to assess pathological gambling among adolescents aged 12 to 15, and explores its accuracy. The DSM-IV-MR-J was first administered in the classroom. Participants were assigned to either an experimental or a control group. Participants in the first group were asked to explain the…

Using data from 82 in-depth interviews with a randomly selected sample of college students, we explore how these students are forming felt identities in the following domains: intelligence and knowledgeability, occupation, and cosmopolitanism. We study the formation of students' identities by considering college an arena of social interaction in…