The Chemistry Teaching Fellowship Program (CTFP) is offered to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers at the University of Toronto as an opportunity to undertake curriculum development and chemistry education research. Projects are run with faculty supervision and focus on designing new laboratory activities, lectures, tutorials,…

The Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators (ISEE) is a national effort to improve STEM education and workforce development by transforming how the next generation of scientists and engineers teach and mentor. Housed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, ISEE is the legacy of the educational side of the Center for Adaptive Optics…

This article focuses on the role of the Association for Science Education (ASE) in supporting and developing policy and practice in primary school science. It first sets the events after the formation of ASE in 1963 in the context of what went before. It then takes a mainly chronological view of some, but by no means all, of ASE's activities…

Business leaders, like education leaders, are acutely aware of what this could mean for the future of this country: Young people might be unprepared for rewarding jobs and the demands of informed citizenship, businesses may not find the talent they need to keep innovating, and the economy may stagnate with too little innovation. To turn the tide,…

The revised National Curriculum for Science for key stages 3 and 4 (ages 11-16) in England provides the opportunity to develop a new coherent approach to teaching about the carbon cycle, the use of carbon as a fuel and the resulting issues. The Earth Science Education Unit (ESEU) intends to develop a new workshop to support the teaching of this…

We developed the Alcohol Pharmacology Education Partnership (APEP), a set of modules designed to integrate a topic of interest (alcohol) with concepts in chemistry and biology for high school students. Chemistry and biology teachers (n = 156) were recruited nationally to field-test APEP in a controlled study. Teachers obtained professional…

Within the field of science education, there remains little agreement as to the definition and characteristics of classroom inquiry. The emerging emphasis on scientific practices in science education reform discourse is underpinned by a need to better articulate the constituent elements of inquiry-based science. While a small number of…

Data from a recent study show that investing in science teachers' professional growth and teaching ability is a wise choice. However, the professional development must have the right content (the science discipline that teachers are actually teaching), at the right time (when they are assigned to teach that science discipline), and in a stable…

The acronym STEM--the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and math--now a familiar term in education, is evolving into STEAM--STEM plus "A" for art. Educational researcher Martin Storksdieck's studies have shown that infusing art into STEM allows for "a different way of perceiving and knowing and dealing with the world, as a means to…

Evaluation of large-scale professional development programmes in a cost-effective but detailed manner presents challenges. Much of the research evidence on the effectiveness of professional development in science education has been the result of small-scale studies that use clustered or stratified sampling methods. Using the evidence collected…

Teaching is a complex activity that requires making ongoing multiple decisions and sporadic, responsive actions all while performing preplanned prescribed tasks. Evidence of certain aspects of teaching can be best assessed with a well-designed observation instrument. This instrument was designed to assess the enactment of the essential elements of…

With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), ITEEA members will contribute to the development of a hybrid professional development program designed to facilitate the scale-up of an innovative underwater robotics curriculum. WaterBotics[TM] is an underwater robotics curriculum that targets students in middle and high school classrooms…

This article proposes strategies and practices that create rich discursive spaces for learning science in French immersion contexts. These strategies and practices are drawn from a variety of scholarly sources; here we adapt them to reading in the French immersion science classroom. The strategies and practices are designed for use in a…

The Akamai Workforce Initiative (AWI) is a program that seeks to develop a skilled local STEM workforce to meet the needs of Hawai'i's growing high-tech industry. Launched as an internship program in 2002, AWI is the result of a long-term collaboration among the University of California Santa Cruz's Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators…

STEM--science, technology, engineering, and mathematics--has become a fixture of the education debate, and much effort already has been put toward improving student performance. Yet troubling statistics persist: On the latest round of testing for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 40 percent of fourth graders nationwide…