The overall aim of this article is to analyze the relationships between the roles of assessment in pedagogy, the interactions between curriculum assessment and pedagogy, and the study of pupils' progression in learning. It is argued that well-grounded evidence of pupils' progressions in learning is crucial to the work of teachers, so that a method…

This study explores the mental images at the microscopic level of matter created by 22 preservice science teachers in Oman. Participants were encouraged during a guided imagery session to construct mental images for a scenario written about the explanation of the reaction of sodium in water. They were then asked to describe what they envisioned in…

This study has identified the effectiveness of using portfolios for the prospective teachers as a tool of an explicit, reflective, and instructional approach in science education. Early childhood science method courses in a college for unskilled early childhood teachers influence their theory and practice toward science teaching. It describes…

The aim of this study is to investigate biology student teachers' ideas about the purpose of laboratory work in teaching biology. Data has been collected from 82 participating students using an open-ended questionnaire and analyzed using content analysis techniques. The results show that almost all of the student teachers considered laboratory…

This study aimed at identifying prospective chemistry teachers' misconceptions of colligative properties. In order to fulfill this aim, a diagnostic test composed of four open-ended questions was used. The test was administered to seventy-eight prospective chemistry teachers just before qualifying to teaching in secondary schools. Nine different…

This study explored the development of a community of learners through a professional development program to improve teachers' views of nature of science (NOS) and teaching practice. The "Views of Nature of Science" questionnaire and interviews were used to assess teachers' conceptions of NOS three times over the course of the study. Notes and…

Science is a social process--one that involves particular ways of talking, reasoning, observing, analyzing, and writing, which often have meaning only when shared within the scientific community. Discussions are one of the best ways to help students learn to "talk science" and construct understanding in a social context. Since inquiry is an…

In this paper, we describe two central epistemological norms related to the importance of making investigations and to scientific language and its logic. These norms have been identified in empirical material consisting of 200 video-recorded lessons in three different science classes. With regard to the learning of science and socialization, we…

This article presents an approach to integrating public e-lectures on contemporary physics into a traditional high-school syllabus. This approach was used in a long-distance professional development course for in-service physics teachers. Each lecture was related to a specific obligatory syllabus chapter, and was accompanied by learner-centred…

School science systems tend to emphasize teaching and learning about achievements of science (such as laws and theories) at the expense of providing students with opportunities to develop realistic conceptions about science and science inquiry and expertise they could use to conduct their own science inquiry projects. Among reasons for such an…

Monk and Osborne ("Sci Educ" 81:405-424, 1997) provide a rigorous justification for why history and philosophy of science should be incorporated as an integral component of instruction and a model for how history of science should be used to promote learning of and about science. In the following essay we critique how history of science is used on…

A proper presentation of scientific discoveries may allow science teachers to eliminate certain myths about the nature of science, which originate from an uncertainty among scholars about what constitutes a discovery. It is shown that a disagreement on this matter originates from a confusion of the act of discovery with response to it. It is…

The notions of "idealisation" and "approximation" are strongly linked to the question of "how our theories represent the phenomena in their scope". Although there is no consensus amongst Philosophers on the nature of the process of idealisation and how it affects theoretical representation, at the level of science education much can be gained from…

The laboratory exercise described in this paper is based on a well-known qualitative demonstration of Curie temperature. A long ferromagnetic wire, in the form of a spiral, is attracted to a strong permanent magnet placed near its midpoint (see Fig. 1). The temperature of the wire is increased by passing a current through it. When the temperature…

Although the resolution to the wave-particle paradox has been known for 80 years, it is seldom presented. Briefly, the resolution is that material particles and photons are the quanta of extended spatially continuous but energetically quantized fields. But because the resolution resides in quantum field theory and is not usually spelled out in…