Understanding the nature of science (NOS) has long been a desired outcome of science education, despite ongoing disagreements about the content, structure, and focus of NOS expectations. Addressing the concern that teachers likely focus only on student learning expectations appearing in standards documents, this study examines the current state of…

The World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe (WHO EURO) and the German Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA) published the Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe in 2010. The standards were developed to provide an overview of those sexuality education issues that should be addressed in school at various specific age levels.…

Knowledge of prerequisite dependencies is crucial to several aspects of learning, from the organization of learning content to the selection of personalized remediation or enrichment for each learner. As the amount of content is scaled up, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually specify all of the prerequisites among the different…

Building on the work of Schmidt et al., we propose a definition of curricular coherence for K-12 mathematics that encompasses both the arrangement of topics, which we call coherence of content, and the habits of mind the curriculum fosters in students, which we call coherence of practice. We give examples to illustrate each. [For the complete…

The term "constructivism" is used very widely and somewhat loosely in education. In this article I aim to clarify the term, which can be used in relation to two quite different theories: one related to "how" we learn and the other related to "what" we learn. Being clear about the origins of the two uses can help…

Creativity brings joy, wonder, efficiency, excitement, and pleasure into our lives. Although creativity can also be malevolent (see, e.g., Cropley et al., Creat Res J 20(2):105-115, 2008), for the most part creativity makes life better, and most of us would like to have and to experience more of it. Nurturing creativity is therefore something that…

As technological advancements continue to revolutionise the realm of education, use of technology in both K-12 and university classrooms paves the way for making flipped classroom a trending pedagogical model. Flipping a course simply means reversing a traditional model of in-class lecture followed by practice and homework. Research has shown that…

The culture wars concerning what history should be taught in U.S. schools are often played out through the release of new state or national history/social studies standards or the textbooks aligned with those standards. Despite their oft-politicized status, every state now has history standards. However, these standards take on different forms in…

This article examines four years of assessed results and student satisfaction for a postgraduate course offered in a "flipped" or "inverted" mode during a four-year period in Hong Kong. Although final examination results rose in the first year and remained high, student satisfaction dropped in the first year and remained low.…

The Mineralogy Concept Inventory (MCI) is a statistically validated 18-question assessment that can be used to measure learning gains in introductory mineralogy courses. Development of the MCI was an iterative process involving expert consultation, student interviews, assessment deployment, and statistical analysis. Experts at the two universities…

A global shortage of qualified physics teachers requires some teachers to teach physics out-of-field (OOF). A concern for OOF physics teaching is that without appropriate physics content knowledge (CK), these teachers tend to focus on rote learning and may find it difficult to support students who require additional assistance or extension; they…

The aim of the study was to compare the effect of a Sport Education-based irregular teaching unit on the high-school students' physical activity (PA) during school recess. A sample of 91 adolescents (45 girls) aged 13-16 years old met the exclusion criteria. The six classes were cluster-randomly assigned to the Irregular Sport Education group…

Constructing the syllabus of a school subject could be a highly contested exercise given the fact that it must cater for the concerns of competing stakeholders and pressures to incorporate all possible aspects of that discipline. For geography, whose field of study is extremely vast, and its nature is not clearly defined, developing its syllabus…

Curriculum change involves struggles among political actors and interest groups, and those efforts related to sex education have been noted for their particularly vexatious character. When Doug Ford was elected Premier of Ontario, Canada in 2018, he immediately repealed the comprehensive health curriculum of 2015 and attempted to muzzle teachers…

This paper examines how seven teachers working in contexts of limited resources used the prescribed textbook for teaching, and the kinds of teacher-textbook relationships forged in the interactions. The study employs a sociocultural perspective to explore the processes by which teachers mobilise the affordances of the textbook to the teacher's…