This article presents the author's brief comment on Hisham B. Ghassib's "Where Does Creativity Fit into a Productivist Industrial Model of Knowledge Production?" Ghassib (2010) takes the reader through an interesting history of human innovation and processes and situates his theory within a productivist model. The deliberate attention to…

The aim of this study is to develop conceptual change texts in the teaching of aspects of the nature of science and to introduce the development of texts. The socio-cultural and the subjective aspects were taken into consideration in the conceptual change texts, which are presented in the study. The conceptual change texts were prepared to be used…

Many have argued that the inclusion of the history of science in science teaching might promote an understanding of the nature of science as well as the attitudes toward science. However, its inclusion in science teaching may not have the desired effect due to the limited coverage it receives in textbooks and the limited time available for…

The starting point of the present research is the following question: since we live in an age that makes increasing use of visual representations of all sorts, is not the visual representation a learner constructs a window into his/her understanding of what is or is not being learned? Following this direction of inquiry, the present preliminary…

A collaborative curriculum development project was set up to address the lack of good examples of teaching about ideas and evidence and the nature of science encountered by student teachers training to teach in the age range 11-16 in schools in England. Student and teacher-mentor pairs devised, taught and evaluated novel lessons and approaches.…

We present calculations of ion-atom collisions using a partial-wave expansion of the projectile wavefunction. Most calculations of ion-atom collisions have typically used classical or plane-wave approximations for the projectile wavefunction, since partial-wave expansions are expected to require prohibitively large numbers of terms to converge…

The equations of motion for electromechanical systems are traced back to the fundamental Lagrangian of particles and electromagnetic fields, via the Darwin Lagrangian. When dissipative forces can be neglected the systems are conservative and one can study them in a Hamiltonian formalism. The central concepts of generalized capacitance and…

This paper describes the use of open source video analysis software in the study of the relationship between the velocity of falling objects and time. We discuss an experiment in which a steel sphere falls in a container filled with two immiscible liquids. The motion is similar to that of a skydiver falling through air.

This paper sets out to provide an overview of scientific literacy specifically related to whether emphasis is placed on the "science" or the "literacy" aspect, accepting that literacy, wherever used, is wider than simply reading and writing. It does this from a general rather than a country perspective. The emphasis in giving meaning to scientific…

This paper reports evidence that learners commonly develop a notion of chemical stability that, whilst drawing upon ideas taught in the curriculum, is nevertheless inconsistent with basic scientific principles. A series of related small-scale studies show that many college-level students consider a chemical species with an octet structure, or a…

The bicycle provides a context-rich problem accessible to students in a first-year physics course, encircling several core physics principles such as conservation of total energy and angular momentum, dissipative forces, and vectors. In this article, I develop a simple numerical model that can be used by any first-year physics student to…

This article describes an initial attempt to find out students' perceptions of class visits to natural history museums, with regard to the museum's role as a place for intellectual and social experience. The study followed up approximately 500 Grades 6-8 students who visited four museums of different sizes, locations and foci. Data sources…

In 2007 many AAPT members received a booklet that is the first chapter of a physics textbook available on a CD. This book espouses the new educational philosophy of teaching special relativity as the first item in the topic of mechanics. Traditionally, special relativity is part of one or more modern physics chapters at the end of the text, and…

While not organic in nature, quick-"growing" artificial membranes can be a profound visual aid when teaching students about cellular processes and the chemical nature of membranes. Students are often intrigued when they see biological and chemical concepts come to life before their eyes. In this article, the authors share their approach to growing…

Water is the ideal green solvent for organic reactions. However, most organic molecules are insoluble in it. Herein, we report a laboratory module that takes advantage of this property. The Passerini reaction, a three-component coupling involving an isocyanide, aldehyde, and carboxylic acid, typically requires [similar to] 24 h reaction times in…