This study addresses suggestions for analyzing science teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) components and their interactions and these suggestions are expected to facilitate the analysis of science teachers' PCK, resulting in more accurate representations of PCK. Knowledge of the science curriculum, knowledge of students' understanding…

The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at St. Mary's College of Maryland has scaffolded collaboration skills throughout the Biochemistry curriculum and developed several assessment tools to evaluate these skills. Biochemistry I and II have used team contracts at the beginning of extensive team projects where students identify their…

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is important for teachers' instructional effectiveness. This study investigated the self-reported level of PCK among in-service elementary school science teachers in a municipality in Ghana, examining the overall level of PCK. An In-Service Elementary Science Teachers Self-Reported PCK (IEST-SR-PCK) scale was…

Introduction: Assessment, historically, has been done in a summative manner in post-secondary education (HE). Whilst useful for the purposes of grading and assessment of competency, there is also increasing pressure from post-secondary education institutions to meet certain standards in terms of education quality and graduate numbers, putting…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to explore the development of pre-service chemistry teachers' pedagogical content knowledge regarding the effect of temperature on reaction rate topic as they took pedagogical content knowledge courses throughout the teacher education program. Pre-service teachers' pedagogical content knowledge was…

Scientific Practices play a central role in the Next Generation Science Standards, influencing the standards of more than 70% of students in the United States. Therefore, a view of what has been studied about Scientific Practices in Science Education, globally in the past decade is relevant. Thus, 44 articles from international journals in Science…

In order to design professional learning that supports rural science teachers to effectively implement standards-based "five-dimensional" (5D) instructional and assessment practices, a critical first step is to elicit their perspectives, prior experiences, concerns, and interests. Based on survey data from 87 rural science teachers in…

A desired outcome of education reform efforts is for undergraduates to effectively integrate knowledge across disciplines in order to evaluate and address real-world issues. Yet there are few assessments designed to measure if and how students think interdisciplinarily. Here, a sample of science faculty were surveyed to understand how they…

Alignment to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) is essential in efforts to interpret the standards and to compare curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment efforts with respect to the standards. However, relatively little work has explored the alignment implications of NGSS. This article is a conceptual analysis that gives an overview of…

Over the past 20 years research on reform efforts aimed at the chemistry laboratory has focused on different aspects of students' experiences including increasing content knowledge, improving student attitudes toward chemistry, incorporating inquiry activities, and providing students a hands-on experience related to the chemistry concepts learned…

Incorporating literacy instruction in science is a beneficial practice that uses interdisciplinary strategies to address connections between language arts and science. Interdisciplinary curricular approaches in education are common expectations for science teachers and there are increasingly more mandates for embedding literacy into science…

This study aims to put forth how and to what degree pre-service science teachers can practice 2018 Secondary School Science Curriculum (SSSC). The study employs an illustrative case study design. Identified through purposive sampling, the participants of the study consist of 28 senior pre-service teachers studying at science teaching program at an…

Practical skills in chemistry are considered an essential outcome of an undergraduate chemistry degree. To achieve this, chemistry curricula are designated a substantial number of hours in teaching laboratories. However, the general method of a summative assessment of these sessions is through a written laboratory report and not through the actual…

Research on Nature of Science (NOS) conceptions and identity development for NOS contains a gap in the realm of examining doctoral students aiming to be science teacher educators. This research examines the NOS identity development of participants in a course focused on the philosophy of science and research about NOS education. The data analyzed…

A sequential exploratory mixed methods approach guided research on the science program infrastructures (SPI) of a sample of 28 high schools representing 1,370 high schools in a large southwestern state. Comparisons of SPI were made between and among schools representing highly successful schools of low (n=9) and high diversity (n=10) with less…