In 2010, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Education Program has established the Deeper Learning Initiative, which focuses on students' development of deeper learning skills (i.e., the mastery of core academic content, critical-thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and "learn-how-to-learn" skills). Two test…

Science education standards established by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Research Council (NRC) urge less emphasis on memorizing scientific facts and more emphasis on students investigating the everyday world and developing deep understanding from their inquiries. These approaches to instruction…

Abstracts of most of the papers, symposia, discussion groups, round tables, and poster sessions presented at the 64th conference of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) are provided. Subject areas addressed are as follows: teacher knowledge, cognitive development, conceptual change, curriculum issues, reform in science…

Presented are the results of an analysis of the cognitive stages of tenth-grade pupils using a six-week unit on the respiratory system. The research design, instruments, and data analysis are discussed. A variety of cognitive levels was found and may be related to learning outcomes. (CW)

Concept maps provided a measure of subjects' cognitive structures before and after completion of an environmental education course. Concept maps were constructed from expressions taken from the issue "global climate." Expressions were assigned to one of three domains: science, technology or society. Maps were analyzed by constituent…

The Board on International Comparative Studies in Education (BICSE) was established by the National Research Council (NRC) in 1988 at the request of the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Under its initial mandate, the board monitored U.S. participation in…

Examines teachers' differing uses of student-gathered data during science investigations. The results show that student language use and concept understanding differed between two different instructional approaches. Suggestions are provided for using student-gathered data in teaching elementary school science. (LZ)

In search of a better understanding of the learning difficulties in basic electricity, learning results, interest, achievement motivation, IQ, and cognitive development were investigated in students from both urban and rural schools. An analysis reveals that, for urban classes, learning is related primarily to interest and motivation and, for…

Describes the effects upon the attitude and achievement of a group of below average sixth grade readers generated by enriching the language arts curriculum from a literature base to a science base. Results indicate that attitude did not improve overall, but the achievement measure increased for 12 of the 17 students. The attitude survey is…

The relationships and possible effects of various personal home and school variables on the acquisition of functional biological, chemical, and physical scientific knowledge by tenth grade Israeli students (n=544) was investigated. Biology was the only subject in which functional knowledge was significantly related to nonformal science activities.…