Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training has introduced educational reforms that require Vietnamese teachers to acquire new understanding and skills using information communication technology (ICT) to support teaching. However, there was little literature to guide Vietnamese teachers on how to achieve these goals. The research goals were to…

A review of the history of Newton's Laws of Motion illustrates that the historical development gradually shifted away from intuitive experiences and daily life conventions towards a scientific regulated perspective. Three stages of the historical development are discussed, i.e. prior to the Principia, the 3rd (last) edition of the Principia,…

The PISA performance of Hong Kong has prompted this study to investigate if scientific literacy (SL) of Hong Kong students can be improved further through a high school biology course employing the STSE approach. A STSE course was developed in accordance to the contexts of Hong Kong and a framework for the assessment of scientific literacy was…

In the light of the education reform driven by Vietnam's government, information communication technologies (ICTs) are becoming integrated into education, while concurrently, teaching approaches are shifting from teacher-centred to student-centred in Vietnam's universities. The innovation is top-down and is being applied on a large scale. Emerging…

This paper considers the standards-based assessment system used for high school science in New Zealand and explores the required assessment literacy of teachers working within this system, using a simple focus-area model. In New Zealand, school qualifications are achieved through the assessment of student work against a set of achievement…

The Ministry of National Education of Turkey has decided to give up traditional methods to be used in the classes and to develop a new secondary school curriculum based on Context-Based Learning (CBL) in 2007. This paper discusses integrating Problem-Based Learning (PBL) tasks into the new physics curriculum in Turkey. A brief overview of a…

Teacher beliefs and practice have been widely debated by educators in order to understand the nature of the relationship between these concepts. Despite the ongoing discussion, there is still no clear definition of belief and it has been used interchangeably with knowledge. Therefore, the first purpose of the study was to clarify the definitions…

The study reports on an investigation of the impact of a Science-Technology-Society (STS) approach in promoting more positive student attitudes toward science that are recommended by current reform documents. A total of 609 students from grades six through nine were selected for a survey of attitudes in two class sections assigned as either…

The purpose of this study is to investigate elementary pre-service teachers' image of science teaching, analyze the gender differences in image of science teaching, and evaluate restructured 2004 education reform by using a Draw-A-Science-Teacher-Test Checklist (DASTT-C). Two hundred thirteen (213) pre-service elementary teachers from three…