The Australian Curriculum (n.d.) describes chemistry as having three interrelated strands, Science Inquiry Skills, Science as a Human Endeavour and Science Understanding. It also states "... the three strands of the Australian Curriculum: Science should be taught in an integrated way". This article will explore a model for integrating…

Research in organic chemistry education has revealed that students often rely on rote memorization when learning mechanisms. Not much is known about student productive resources for causal reasoning. To investigate incipient stages of student causal reasoning about single mechanistic steps of organic reactions, we developed a theoretical framework…

Matter can be described and explained in a number of ways, using models of increasing complexity depending on the intended audience. Under the current National Curriculum for England, the kinetic theory of matter is taught to 11- and 12-year-olds in secondary schools to explain the structure of solids, liquids and gases and their behaviour when…

Almost all commercial quadrupole ICP-MS instruments use collision/reaction cells to either attenuate spectral interferences or shift the analyte of interest to an interference-free "m/z" (e.g., by O addition). A laboratory practical was developed to introduce the students to the basic operating principles of ICP-MS using a hands-on…

Introducing Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (NST) topics into school science curricula is considered useful for an in-depth understanding of the content, processes and nature of science and technology, and also for negotiating the social aspects of science. This study examines (a) the development of an inquiry-based Teaching-Learning Sequence (TLS)…

Research on mechanistic thinking in organic chemistry has shown that students attribute little meaning to the electron-pushing (i.e., curved arrow) formalism. At the University of Ottawa, a new curriculum has been developed in which students are taught the electron-pushing formalism prior to instruction on specific reactions--this formalism is…

A non-experimental descriptive and correlational design was used to examine the "notion of the nature of scientific model, atom achievement and correlation between the two" held by a total sample of 76 prospective science teachers. "Students' Understanding of Models in Science" scale was utilized to evaluate the views of the…

In this study, we investigated students' understanding of concepts related to the microscopic model of gas. We thoroughly reviewed the relevant literature and conducted think alouds with students by asking them to answer open-ended questions about the kinetic molecular theory of gases. Thereafter, we transformed the open-ended questions into…

Noby Leong is a PhD student in Chemistry at University of Adelaide working on the design of new drug delivery systems for medical applications. He's also a science communicator, part of the volunteer blogging community at RiAus and curator of his own blog "The Other Side of Science." In this article Noby shares the highs and lows that…

As the application of nanotechnology in everyday life impacts society, it becomes critical for citizens to have a scientific basis upon which to judge their perceived hopes and fears of 'nano'. Although multiple instruments have been designed for assessing attitudinal and affective aspects of nano, surprisingly little work has focused on…

This study focuses on students' conceptions of electric and magnetic fields at university level and of the interrelations between them. A total of 33 students participated in a paper and pencil test after the completion of first-year electricity and second-year electromagnetism courses. The conceptions were investigated in the contexts of a…

The purpose of this study was to investigate Grade 10 Thai students about their understanding on inter- and intramolecular forces. Sixty four students were elicited by administered open-ended questions after finishing normal instruction on chemical bonding topics. The instrument was in a set of open-ended questions which contained a number of…

The microbial growth curve is widely studied within microbiology classes and bacteria are usually the microbial model used. Here, we describe a novel laboratory protocol involving flow cytometry to assess the growth dynamics of the unicellular microalgae "Isochrysis galbana." The algal model represents an appropriate alternative to…

Meiosis is a biological concept that is both complex and important for students to learn. This study aims to explore first-year biology students' explanations of the process of meiosis, using an explicit theoretical framework provided by the Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO) model. The research was based on responses of 334…

As research shows that the knowledge and use of models and modelling by teachers is limited, particularly for predicting phenomena, we developed and applied a sequence of three representations of a simulated model focusing on polarization and specifically showing the behaviour of an atom, and forces exerted on a dipole and an insulator, when a…