The Precipitating Change Project was a 5-year development, implementation, and research study of an innovative 4-week middle school curricular unit in computational weather forecasting that integrates students' learning and use of meteorology and computational thinking (CT) concepts and practices. The project produced a list of CT skills and…

Writing in science can be challenging for all learners, and it is especially so for students with cognitive or language-based learning difficulties. We examined the effects of a cognitive apprenticeship on student disciplinary writing skills as well as near and far transfer of learning outcomes. This instructional approach included a gradual…

Introducing Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (NST) topics into school science curricula is considered useful for an in-depth understanding of the content, processes and nature of science and technology, and also for negotiating the social aspects of science. This study examines (a) the development of an inquiry-based Teaching-Learning Sequence (TLS)…

The purpose of this study was to use drama as a springboard for promoting argumentation among 91 first-semester undergraduate medical students (56 females and 35 males, 16-30 years old) in Colombia during a complete teaching-learning sequence (TLS) supervised by the same teacher. The drama used was the play "Should've," written by Nobel…

Science teaching and learning require knowledge about how learning takes place (cognition) and how learners interact with their surroundings (affective and sociocultural factors). The study reported on focussed on learning for understanding of Newton's second law of motion from a cognitive perspective that takes social factors into account. A…

This is the start of a road map for the effective introduction of inquiry-based learning in chemistry. Advantages of inquiry-based approaches to the development of scientific literacy are widely discussed in the literature. However, unless chemistry educators take account of teachers' reservations and identified disadvantages such approaches will…

In two H[subscript 2] [superscript 15]O PET scan experiments, we investigated the cerebral correlates of explicit and implicit knowledge in a serial reaction time (SRT) task. To do so, we used a novel application of the Process Dissociation Procedure, a behavioral paradigm that makes it possible to separately assess conscious and unconscious…

One notable line of inquiry, aspects of which date back to the early 1980s, involves the design and implementation not of long-term curricula, but of topic-oriented sequences for teaching science. One distinguishing characteristic of a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) is its inclusion in a gradual research-based volutionary process aiming at…

Results of this study suggest that diagrams provide different types of information for ninth-grade students (N=273) and that learners process each type differently. Flow diagrams running across a page from either left to right or right to left, or with or without drawings of dinosaurs, were used. (JN)

Reports on students' study and drawing of five electronic circuit diagrams. Concludes that the success of the students depended upon the amount of detail in the instructional diagrams. (RT)

Reported is the production of an instructional methodology harmonizing with Piagetian theory and enabling teenage students, including those initially mismatched to the task, to understand the mole, as revealed by their performances on a test of basic skills considered fundamental to that concept. (DS)

The purpose of the research was to manipulate two aspects of genetics instruction in order to measure their effects on college, introductory biology students' achievement in genetics. One instructional sequence that was used dealt first with monohybrid autosomal inheritance patterns, then sex-linkage. The alternate sequence was the reverse.…

Turtle graphics is a popular vehicle for introducing children to computer programming. Children combine simple graphic commands to get a display screen cursor (called a turtle) to draw designs on the screen. The purpose of this study was to examine young children's abilities to function in a simple computer programming environment. Four- and…

This article suggests that a genuine reform endeavor towards the "Science for All" paradigm should adopt a holistic approach. There are several countries around the world that adopted the "Science for All" paradigm at the beginning of the 21st century. However, while looking closely at the amount of change that took place in…