This study addresses suggestions for analyzing science teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) components and their interactions and these suggestions are expected to facilitate the analysis of science teachers' PCK, resulting in more accurate representations of PCK. Knowledge of the science curriculum, knowledge of students' understanding…

The shift from science inquiry to science practices as recommended in the US reports "A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas" and the "Next Generation Science Standards" has implications for classroom/school level instruction and assessment practices and, therefore, for…

The Irish national discourse on curriculum and assessment reform at the Junior Cycle level has been fraught with controversy in the past two years. The introduction of the new curriculum and assessment framework in 2012 by the then Minister of Education, Ruairi Quinn has led to significant media coverage and teacher union response. In this paper,…

Assessment of learning plays a dominant role in formal education in the forms of determining features of curriculum that are emphasized, pedagogic methods that teachers use with their students, and parents' and employers' understanding of how well students have performed. A common perception is that fair assessment applies the same mode of…

The principles of course redesign that were applied to a gateway Cell Biology course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee are applicable to courses large and small, and to institutions of any size. The challenge was to design a content-rich science course that kept pace with present and future content and at the same time use principles of…

When teachers or students assess the quality of ideas in science classes, they do so mostly based on "textbook correctness"; ideas are good to the extent they align with or lead to the content as presented in the textbook or curriculum. Such appeals to authority are at odds with the values and practices within the disciplines of science. There has…

The debate around which factors drive medical students' learning is ongoing and controversial. What is the influence of an assessment's weighting on the motivation of students to study the particular subject? One medical school in London is in a unique position to investigate this question. At our institution, the weighting of Anatomy within the…

Recent research indicated that students' ability to construct evidence-based explanations in classrooms through scientific inquiry is critical to successful science education. Structured argumentation support environments have been built and used in scientific discourse in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, no research work in the…

One of the challenges facing school educators is motivating students to learn science. This study is part of an evaluation of enriched science curriculum introduced in five western Canadian (Alberta) urban schools. The objective was to develop a multidimensional instrument suitable for evaluating the attitudes of students toward science with a…

There are concerns in the literature that the use of case-based teaching of anatomy could be compromising the depth and scope of anatomy learned by students in a problem-based learning curriculum. Poor selection of clinical cases that are used as vehicles for teaching/learning anatomy may be the root problem because some clinical cases do not…

The purpose of this qualitative exploratory study was to identify factors that influenced prospective and experienced secondary level science teachers' reasoning as they evaluated or selected tasks to formatively assess their students' understanding of scientific concepts. The analysis of the coded written responses revealed two categories of…

In science education, students should come to understand the nature and significance of models. In the case of chemistry education it is argued that the present use of models is often not meaningful from the students' perspective. A strategy to overcome this problem is to use an authentic chemical modelling practice as a context for a curriculum…

An investigation on whether a course designed strategically so that assessment methods are aligned with course objectives promotes the students' capacity for higher-order cognitive thinking is presented. Students' view of their own learning process in this course is examined.

Even the best program in education will fail to have the intended impact if its essential elements are not implemented properly. Degree of implementation is, then, critical to draw valid conclusions on program outcomes (e.g., Scheirer & Rezmovic, 1983). Especially important is the information on the fidelity with which a program is implemented.…

This evaluation report describes the process by which a large urban-suburban school system evaluated a locally developed, systemwide, kindergarten through grade 12 science program and the results of the evaluation. The evaluation was based upon a set of broad evaluation questions related to three components of the science program: (1) the science…