Recent calls for reform in education recommend science curricula to be based on central ideas instead of a larger number of topics and for alignment between current scientific research and curricula. Because alignment is rarely studied, especially for central ideas, we developed a methodology to discover the extent of alignment between primary…

This study aims to identify students' misconceptions regarding covalent bonds. Seventy-seven graduate students in the middle of Indonesia participated in the study. Data were collected in three stages. First, misconceptions were identified by using the Semi Open Diagnostic Test. Ten students who experienced the worst misconceptions were…

In this study, we examined opportunities for reasoning and meaning making that read-alouds of children's literature science information books and related hands-on explorations offered to young Latina/o students in an urban public school. Using a qualitative, interpretative framework, we analyzed classroom discourse and children's writing…

Researchers and practitioners alike express concerns about the conceptual difficulties associated with the concepts of momentum and kinetic energy currently taught in school physics. This article presents an in-depth analysis of the treatment given to them in 44 published textbooks written for UK secondary school certificate courses. This is set…

Because textbooks have the potential to be powerful catalysts for improving science teaching and learning, having reliable methods for analyzing important textbook features, such as their coherence, is essential. This study reports on the development of a method in which trained reviewers, following a set of guidelines defining the ideas to be…

Linguistic content analysis, method of encoding textual data by categorizing key words and identifying relationships, was developed to assess degree to which science was portrayed as process of inquiry within high school biology textbook series. The frequency of science as a process of inquiry increased from 1956 to 1965, then showed a pattern of…

Electrochemistry plays an important role in curricula, textbooks, and in everyday life. The purpose of the present study was to identify and understand secondary-school students' problems in learning electrochemistry at an introductory chemistry level. The investigation covered four areas: (a) electrolytes, (b) transport of electric charges in…

Initial textbook investigations indicate that more new words/phrases are introduced than in a similar time frame in which foreign languages are studied. Reviews these initial studies, studies of vocabulary mastery in foreign languages, and general research concerning vocabulary development. Reports on occurrence of technical/special words in 25…

Reports on a study designed to examine selected units of commonly used elementary science texts, using the Project Synthesis goal clusters as a framework for part of the examination. The discussion of the finding focuses on the comparison of the results to recommendations of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). (TW)

Develops a history and philosophy of science framework based on a rational reconstruction of experimental observations that led to the Millikan-Ehrenhaft controversy, and evaluates 31 chemistry books for coverage of the controversy. Finds that most books lacked a history and philosophy of science perspective and did not adequately address several…

This case study explored sociocultural forces that influenced three 10th grade public high school biology teachers' instructional goals, instructional acts, and identity narratives related to the teaching of evolution. Primary data included field observations of classroom instruction and teacher interviews. Secondary data included informal…

Study compared two generations of seven high school chemistry texts (1970/1973) and current editions analyzed for gender fairness in illustrations and concrete analogies. Among conclusions was there were significant differences between the old textbooks and newer textbooks in relative frequencies of illustrations of men and woman and no…

Reports on misconceptions held by intermediate grade students concerning chemistry textbook concepts, on the relation of reasoning ability to those misconceptions, and on the extent that textbooks encourage misconceptions. Concludes that the level of understanding displayed for the selected concepts, in combination with the nature of students'…

The objectives of this study were to develop a method for scoring the level of abstraction (LOA) of science reading material and explore its relationship with other methods for assessing curriculum materials. LOA is defined as the ratio of the nonconcrete concepts to the total number of concepts in a written passage expressed as a percent.…

Reports on a study to determine the effects of the presentation of questions inserted into texts for students in introductory biology. Results indicated that students reading the text with questions at the beginning of the paragraph scored significantly higher on achievement tests than the students reading without questions. (TW)