Recent reforms in K-12 science education call for curricular materials that are designed to be "coherent for students." This form of coherence arises when the classroom community sees their science work as addressing their questions and problems. In enactment, the teacher sometimes has to improvise from the planned trajectory of the…

Today, science is a major part of western culture. Discussions about the need for members of the public to access and understand scientific information are therefore well established, citing the importance of such information to responsible citizenship, democracy, socially accountable scientific research and public funding (National Research…

This study examines cognitive and social processes in group interactions that shape collaborative learning in science classrooms. Three small groups of students were observed while working collaboratively on explaining the burning of a candle under a jar. The learning environment served as a context for examination of conceptual convergence, a…

The study sought to investigate the effects of available science materials, the physical plant, and the patterns of teacher behavior on the behaviors of fifth-grade students. Some significant treatment as well as aptitude-treatment effects were observed. (CP)

Fifteen Australian ninth-grade science classes used Australian Science Education Project (ASEP) curriculum materials with one of three levels of teacher structuring. Videotaped classes were analyzed for student and teacher behaviors. Concludes that more structuring results in more cognitive activity, more experimentation, and less task-irrelevant…

Describes a study using two types of macroanalytic analyses of observed teacher behaviors in the classroom. The findings of the study showed one of the macroanalytic techniques to be more effective as it identified broader behavior patterns occurring over longer periods of time. (MLH)

This study attempted to investigate relationships between pupil achievement and teacher verbal activity. Twelve teachers were recorded/observed teaching four lessons each to groups of 10 sixth-grade children. Results were not significant. (SL)

Activities in 31 Israeli high school biology and 4 college-level laboratories in first and second years of medical school were analyzed using the Classroom Observation Instruments. Percentages of time spent in pre-lab discussion (problem identification, instructions); lab-work (identifying investigation components, responding to students,…

Studied the relationship of teachers' I/D ratio to their students' achievement and retention of learning in senior high chemistry and junior high general science classes. Concluded that the student score on a standardized achievement test was dependent on the teacher I/D ratio as measured on Flanders scale. (CC)

There are two major points to this study. First, not all modeling protocals are equally effective in changing the investigative teaching behavior of teachers. Second, three-dimensional representation used in interpreting verbal interaction matrices should not replace the procedures of conventional analysis of such matrices. (Author/MA)

Studies the effects of student-structured (SSLS) and teacher-structured (TSLS) teaching strategies. SSLS students consistently exhibited lower frequencies of teacher dependency behaviors than TSLS students. Need affiliation results varied with the grade level of students. (MA)

Discusses the number of observations necessary to obtain a trustworthy sample of classroom transactions by reanalyzing existing data. Eleven to twenty observations appear necessary for teachers' questions which require students to hypothesize. The reliability of a single observation was zero for four other questioning types. (CC)

Investigates the influence of treatment and the interactions between treatments and selected pupil characteristic variables, with respect to pupil achievement and preference for treatment, and examines treatment-teacher interactions. Among the findings, this study suggests that students prefer to operate in less structured modes for the medium or…

Interaction process analysis was used to study the verbal behavior patterns of 10 junior high science teachers. For each teacher, the highest and lowest ability intact classes with whom the teacher worked were studied. Findings revealed that teachers were significantly more indirect and asked more divergent and evaluative questions of the higher…

Reports on a study of the interactions of students in Australian high schools and was designed to focus on "target students" who monopolized whole class interactions. Students who were asked by teachers to be target students tended to have higher formal reasoning ability and achievement levels than the other students. (TW)