An introductory physics course may be run like a video game, where students have an almost unlimited number of attempts to demonstrate their competencies through a sequence of zero-penalty assessments until the end of a semester. Each checkpoint is conducted as a 10-minute, one-on-one oral interview with the instructor, and students are not…

The purpose of this study was to use drama as a springboard for promoting argumentation among 91 first-semester undergraduate medical students (56 females and 35 males, 16-30 years old) in Colombia during a complete teaching-learning sequence (TLS) supervised by the same teacher. The drama used was the play "Should've," written by Nobel…

Describes major theses of Piaget's work on development of intelligence. Implications of this work are significant in terms of methods, curriculum, and sequence of topics and activities used in science classrooms. Author cautions, however, that work of other child psychologists should not be completely forgotten because of Piaget's ideas. (PS)

One notable line of inquiry, aspects of which date back to the early 1980s, involves the design and implementation not of long-term curricula, but of topic-oriented sequences for teaching science. One distinguishing characteristic of a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) is its inclusion in a gradual research-based volutionary process aiming at…

Study indicates that: "Verbal instruction could be employed to teach manual performance skills not only in science but in other subject areas and in industry as well." (Author)

Describes the objectives, the procedures, and the evaluation involved in a personalized system of instruction (PSI) that has been introduced, as an option and as an alternative, in teaching a general physics course at Purdue University. (GA)

This paper reports upon a study addressing teaching and learning about solubility to Turkish first-year secondary school students (age 14-15). The principal aim of the research was to investigate the impact on students' understanding of solubility, of introducing a simple particle model of matter. A teaching intervention to fit within the existing…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate a practical procedure for determining the optimum sequencing of pictorial classification tasks in science using mean difficulty indices generated by a standard sample of grade two students. Acquisition of such skills can affect the learner's performance on subsequent material and the teacher's efforts in…

The purpose of the research was to manipulate two aspects of genetics instruction in order to measure their effects on college, introductory biology students' achievement in genetics. One instructional sequence that was used dealt first with monohybrid autosomal inheritance patterns, then sex-linkage. The alternate sequence was the reverse.…

This article suggests that a genuine reform endeavor towards the "Science for All" paradigm should adopt a holistic approach. There are several countries around the world that adopted the "Science for All" paradigm at the beginning of the 21st century. However, while looking closely at the amount of change that took place in…