In the last twenty years in US science education, professional development has emphasized the need to change science instruction from a direct instruction model to a more participatory and constructivist learning model. The result of these reform efforts has seen an increase in science education professional development that is focused on…

Teaching nature of science (NOS) is beginning to take root in science education in China. This exploratory study interviewed 24 science teacher educators from economically developed parts of China about their conceptions of teaching NOS to prospective science teachers. Five key dimensions emerged from the data. This paper focuses on the dimension…

Student attitudes about learning science and student ideas about the nature of science were compared at the end of two astronomy courses taught in Fall 2007, a course with a traditional astronomy curriculum and a transformed course, whose traditional astronomy curriculum was supplemented by an embedded curriculum that explicitly addressed the…

In teaching science, the beliefs of teachers may come into conflict and inhibit the implementation of reformed teaching practice. An experienced biology teacher, Mr. Hobbs, was found to have two different sets of epistemological beliefs while his classroom practice was predominantly teacher-centered. A case study was then performed in order to…

The use of high stakes testing to improve educational outcomes falls short in many settings. Proposals for improvement include providing more opportunities for students to extend their thinking, gaining experience in the social nature of science, and learning how to interpret, explain, and justify results. This phenomenological qualitative project…

The need for the inclusion of socio-scientific issues (SSI) into science curricula has been generally accepted, but relatively few science teachers have incorporated SSI into their courses. Most science teachers feel that their most important task by far is to teach the principles of science, and any substantive pedagogical changes represent a…

The changing nature of engineering problems and new challenges that result from globalization and new ways of doing business have triggered calls for a revolutionary shift in engineering education. To respond to these challenges, the engineering education paradigm has been revised by adding more design and humanities/social sciences components to…

In an attempt to better support the mathematics and science learning experiences of preservice teacher candidates, a new course of study was created as part of a teacher certification program at a mid-Atlantic liberal art university. Entitled Investigations in Science and Mathematics, the two semester course adopted an integrated inquiry and…

This article is about an investigation of six middle school science teachers' beliefs and instructional practice about the coherence of the science they teach as articulated by National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996). Many well intentioned reform efforts focus on improving content knowledge of teachers, but many classroom teachers…

Given the important role of science teacher educators in developing science teachers' understandings of nature of science (NOS), this study explores 15 Turkish "prospective" science teacher educators' beliefs about NOS in the context of teacher education reform in Turkey. A reflection-oriented qualitative approach was adopted in the…