Recent reform movements within the United States have called for science for all and educational reforms to support this goal. In light of these reform movements and concerns regarding learning within urban schools, science educators and policy makers have pushed for the incorporation of learning technologies within schools as a way of creating…

Are traditional laboratories in the core introductory biology courses teaching physiology majors the art and trade of science, or simply leaving them with a memory of trivial experiments done for unknown reasons? Our students, a population dominated by premed and physiology majors, think the latter and have encouraged us to challenge this model,…

The ideas in this article arose from the National Union of Teachers' professional development programme "Putting life into science -- primary science and citizenship" that the author ran with Will Ord from SAPERE. As with other NUT "Teacher 2Teacher" programmes, this course had two major inputs, in January and June, with the intervening time…

In this article, the author describes the educational potential of a garden project. When the opportunity to visit a school in Amsterdam arose as part of her primary science PGCE course, the author jumped at the chance to experience science learning in another country. The majority of teaching that took place was topic-based, and science was…

The author shares her personal view about when it is useful for children to record their work in science, what helps their learning, and what switches them off, describing some fairly common scenarios. In her role as an Ofsted inspector, the author is privileged to observe, talk to, and learn from dedicated, inspirational, and gifted teachers who…

Cultural diversity is a key concept informing the recently introduced New South Wales Stages 4 and 5 (junior high school) science syllabus. In this paper I undertake a genealogical analysis of the discourses of culture and cultural diversity found in the syllabus itself and in the accompanying syllabus support document. The discourses used in the…

In 2000, the Ontario Ministry of Education removed "Environmental Science" from the secondary school curriculum as single-focus, stand-alone courses. Instead, the Ministry chose to integrate or "infuse" ecological concepts in other science and geography courses. In this study, surveys were sent out to science and geography…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of conceptual change texts accompanied with concept mapping instruction, compared to traditional instruction (TI), on 8th grade students' understanding of solution concepts and their attitudes toward science as a school subject. Solution Concept Test was developed as a result of examination…

With Harry Potter fever gripping the globe again this year, Charlene Haviland recently scored national media attention for a new after-school program which ties science experiments into a certain young wizard's adventures--as well as other children's literature. An 8th-grade teacher at Norfolk, Virginia's Northside Middle School, Haviland has had…

There are increasing calls in the science education community for "science for citizenship" as an important goal for the school science curriculum of the 21st century. The potential influence of portrayals of science and scientists in popular culture on the achievement of this goal is explored in this paper through a review of the literature. We…

This article presents the findings from a qualitative field study of students' "lived experiences" in the University of Minnesota political science course "Democracy and Education" and practicum "Coaching Public Achievement." This study has two key purposes: to better understand how undergraduates learn through these…

Analyzes the main aspects of the reality of engineering education from 1980 to 1996 in Palestine. Provides possible approaches for the development of engineering education in the future based on progress in comprehensive national development. (DDR)

Complete your review of where science education in the U.S. is heading with this wide-ranging look at secondary-level science curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Through lively examples of classroom practice, interviews with award-winning science teachers and science education experts, and a thorough review of the research, discover how…

Students in elementary classrooms are not receiving science instruction that is engaging and challenging. The review of the literature indicates that the way that the information is presented has more of an impact on the students than simply whether they comprehend the information. Studies show that hands-on science instruction allows success…

This study characterizes how learning and teaching differs as the responsibility for choosing curriculum goals and the strategies to reach those goals shifts between teacher and the students. Three different pedagogical approaches were used with 125 seventh-grade and eighth-grade students. All three curricula focus on electromagnetism, and were…