This rise in the use of social networks presents new ethical, legal, and professional challenges for educators. Pre-service teachers need professional development to be cognizant of the content they are posting to personal social networks. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to develop professional development guidelines to help…

The purpose of this article is to re-conceptualize the role of the monolingual teacher in mainstream K-12 classrooms in the United States who work with students who are mostly multilingual and transnational. The proposed role for monolingual teachers is to incorporate at least some of the resources available in students' native languages, even if…

The present study aims to identify first year Turkish Science undergraduates' understandings and misconceptions of the concept of light and its propagation. For this purpose, an instrument composed of four open-ended questions was developed by the researchers. The diagnostic test was piloted with twenty students and modifications were made prior…

This study aims to analyse university students' reasoning regarding two laws of electromagnetism: Gauss's law and Ampere's law. It has been supposed that the problems seen in understanding and applying both laws do not spring from students' misconceptions. Students habitually use reasoning known in the literature as 'common sense' methodology that…

Educators are increasingly looking to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) as a means of enhancing student learning. The New Life Sciences (NLS) is a domain where complex and often abstract concepts must be communicated from a scientific perspective and understood by the student in terms of their underlying implications. This…

Students bring prior knowledge to their learning experiences. This prior knowledge is known to affect how students encode and later retrieve new information learned. Teachers and content developers can use information about students' prior knowledge to create more effective lessons and materials. In many content areas, particularly the sciences,…

Students attending a lecture usually have a wide range of prior knowledge about the topic in question. Rather than seeing this as a problem, lecturers can take advantage of such differences. This article shows how students' misconceptions about old age were used to inform a lecture on the topic. Prior knowledge can thus be used to aid teaching and…

Results of a basic life science literacy survey of 300 undergraduates with both science and nonscience interests found that many do not know elementary facts and that women outscored men on 6 of the 12 questions. The study shows that scientific literacy remains a serious problem in the United States. (KR)

Reports on a small-scale investigation of student understanding of moments of forces to provide some indication as to the nature of intuitive ideas in this area. Results of the investigation suggest three stumbling blocks in the conceptual understanding of moment of forces. (Author/ASK)

In 1944, noted conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote: "Acts of conservation without the requisite desires and skill are futile. To create these desires and skills, and the community motive, is the task of education." Almost sixty years later, in January 2003, the National Science Foundation released a report of its Advisory Committee for…

Reports results of procedures directed at isolating and identifying students' difficulties in comprehending the concepts involved in lessons about gas exchange and respiration. Indicates that pupils (n=137) had deficient understanding of prerequisite concepts and tended to operate at the concrete operational level, whereas the highly abstract…