Background: One of the most important goals of science education is to enable students to understand the nature of science (NOS). However, generally regular science teaching in classrooms does not help students improve informed NOS views. Purpose: This study investigated the influence of an explicit reflective conceptual change approach compared…

Almost 700 Swedish and South African students from the upper secondary school and first-term chemistry university level responded to our survey on concepts of chemical bonding. The national secondary school curricula and most common textbooks for both countries were also surveyed and compared for their content on chemical bonding. Notable…

This article considers the influence that assessment exerts on poetry education. By means of research conducted in a post-16 educational context in Malta, it shows that teachers' and students' practices in the poetry lesson are determined by the kind of examinations that candidates sit for. When the mode of assessment is constituted solely by the…

The study described in this article incorporates qualitative research through in-depth, individual, structured interviews with 12 biology faculty from two Midwestern universities to explore perceptions about how they have learned to teach and how they work to improve their skills.

This qualitative multiple case study utilizes a Black feminist ethic of caring (Collins, 2009; Thompson, 1998) to explore how three African American women social studies teachers draw on their personal and community knowledge to conceptualize and teach the construct of citizenship to their students of color. Instead of conveying traditional…

New teachers enter the field with a passion for making a difference with students, their newly gained knowledge from their preparation experiences, and a sense that there is still much to learn. Faced with the same responsibilities as their experienced colleagues, new teachers also enter the field looking for ways to cope with, adjust to, and…

Studio-based learning in higher education music is held generally to be of central importance and highly effective. Although there are indirect reports of studio apprenticeships that have not proved effective, direct evidence that might support the deliberate investigation of "dissonant" studio practices remains rare. This article takes…

The planned removal of "tiering" from the Geography examinations, which mark the end of compulsory schooling at age 16 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, means that students of all abilities will be expected to sit the same examination with the same content. However, the learning and preparation process will not necessarily be the…

This study was designed to add to the research on teachers' self-efficacy beliefs by examining preservice teachers' culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy doubts. We examined the tasks that preservice teachers felt least efficacious to successfully execute and explored the reasoning behind these self-efficacy doubts. Consequently, we were…

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Irish primary teachers, and particularly those working in disadvantaged schools, are coming under increasing pressure to orient their practices towards satisfying the exigencies of accountability and performativity (Conway, P. F., and R. Murphy. 2013. "A Rising Tide Meets a Perfect Storm: New Accountabilities…

This article, derived from a three-year ethnography of distributed medical education provision in a Canadian university, explores the ways in which information and communication technologies are used by teachers and students in their everyday work within technologically rich teaching environments. The environments being researched are two…

Background: Sustainable development, as an area of knowledge, appears in several different places in the curriculum and does not fit neatly within the scope of traditional subject areas. In many countries, including Sweden, it has long been upheld as an important tool for increasing understanding of, and dealing with, environmental problems. It is…

Becoming a teacher involves a continual process of identity development and negotiation. Expectations and norms for particular pedagogies impact and inform this development. In inquiry based classes, instructors are expected to act as learning facilitators rather than information providers. For novice inquiry instructors, developing a teacher…

This paper introduces a new model to represent how individuals can develop a deepened understanding of both a foreign culture and of their own culture as a result of viewing and engaging with foreign media, and in particular foreign films and television series. The model emerged from data collected in a study of how Chinese university students…

The purpose of this case study is to delve into the complexities of how preservice science teachers' science teaching orientations, viewed as an interrelated set of beliefs, interact with the other components of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Eight preservice science teachers participated in the study. Qualitative data were collected in the…