One of the challenges of science education is to integrate activities, content, and tools in a meaningful manner. One way to address this challenging goal is the transformation of authentic scientific practices into contexts for learning, in line with sociocultural activity theory. In this respect, authentic scientific practices are interpreted as…

This ethnographic research examines how children enact developing understandings in science through multiple interactions. Grounded in sociocultural theoretical frameworks, we consider learning to be a social, cultural practice, with understandings as co-constructed between participants through talk and in interactions. With these underpinning…

Described is a curriculum project developed in Germany. The importance of playing and gaming for the acquisition of cognitive and social capacities, the relationships among acting, reasoning, and learning in physics instruction, and the spheres of subjective experience are discussed. The framework and evaluation of the curriculum are outlined. (YP)

Reviews and compares results of content analysis studies of selected high school science laboratory handbooks using the Laboratory Structure and Task Analysis Inventory (LAI). Findings from two biology, two chemistry, and two physics handbooks indicate highly structured investigations where students perform manipulative and observational…

Discusses the use of the taxonomy of educational objectives to analyze two lessons from Science - A Process Approach. Indicates that the material provides a considerable variety of cognitive behaviors on the part of students. (CC)

Three themes emerged from interviews with 149 elementary through secondary students: instructional strategies, cognitive demands, and students' ideas about how science should be taught. Elementary students enjoyed the messing around quality of their activities. Junior high school students were becoming uncomfortable with open-ended activities. In…

Examines features of science experiments that make them interesting to middle school students (n=59 seventh graders). Compared a model of interest in learning with the reasons students gave for liking experiments. Latent partition analysis was used to derive an empirical model from characteristics of interesting science experiments. (PR)

Describes the adaptation process involved in modifying the outdoor biology instructional strategies (OBIS) project to the local environment and educational system in Israel. (HM)