Science controversy has the potential to reinforce students' understanding of important biological concepts as well as helping students forge connections between concepts they may have previously seen disparate. Science controversy has the potential to help students make cross-disciplinary connections and therefore it should become an integral…

A simple, qualitative experiment is developed for implementation, where the gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) plays an important role, into the laboratory curriculum of a chemistry course designed for nonscience majors. This laboratory experiment is well suited for the students as it helps them to determine the validity of their…

Accepting that scientific literacy is the primary purpose of science in the compulsory years of schooling leads to the question 'What does scientific literacy mean in a particular community?' This paper reports a study designed to provide some insight into that question. Data were gathered through interviews with a sample of community leaders, in…

Develops activities based on pedagogical research that indicate that student engagement and comprehension are enhanced by methodologies that promote active participation, critical thinking, and an interdisciplinary, contextualist approach to teach evolutionary theory to students in an upper-division, capstone course. Provides critical thinking…

The new science curriculum in Ireland is promoting a more scientific culture in the primary phase. For many years, science teaching in the Republic of Ireland at primary level was little more than a comprehension exercise. However, with the introduction of the new curriculum in 1998, science education has changed radically, becoming a more…

Increasingly, teaching assistants and parents are engaging with children across the curriculum in group-led activities. However, whereas in literacy and numeracy the outcome of activities is predetermined and the same objectives and teaching points are reinforced over a week or a fortnight, in science things can be very different. Helpers often…

The crisis in physics education necessitates searching for new relevant meanings of physics knowledge. This paper advocates regarding physics as the dialogue among discipline-cultures, rather than as a cluster of disciplines to be an appropriate subject of science education. In a discipline-culture one can distinguish elements of knowledge as…

The purpose of this study was to examine middle childhood students' perceptions of the learning environment in a reform-based physics course. A lecture-style, introductory physics course was modified into an inquiry-based course designed for preservice middle childhood teachers through the collaborative efforts of faculty in the Colleges of…

Choices in science--allocation of research funds, selection of research topics, interaction with research subjects (animals, environment, other humans), etc.--often, if not always, include some ethical considerations. Future scientists need skills to deal with and discuss ethical problems, and for that reason we have developed and evaluated one…

Recent events in the United States have brought anti-evolution efforts into the forefront of the media's coverage of science education, and it makes press in Canadian outlets as well. Canadians can be regularly heard scoffing at American debacles such as the controversy regarding the denigration of evolution in Kansas's science standards, the…

This study first offers a defence of the view that natural science has transcultural intellectual characteristics relevant to its educational purposes and examines those characteristics under their ontic, epistemic, and value-related aspects. While the epistemic domain has been most prominent in relation to the science curriculum and its reform,…

We report on an outcomes assessment of the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) Program at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Using follow-up survey data and academic transcripts, we gauge SURE's impact on levels of interest in, preparedness for, and actual pursuit of graduate study and professional careers in the sciences for the…

This study compared the efficacy of 3 approaches to professional development in middle school Earth science organized around the principles of Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998) in a sample of 53 teachers from a large urban district. Teachers were randomly assigned to a control group or to 1 of 3 conditions that varied with…

The present study examined the outcomes of a newly designed four-lesson science module on opinion-forming in the context of genomics in upper secondary education. The lesson plan aims to foster 16-year-old students' opinion-forming skills in the context of genomics and to test the effect of the use of fiction in the module. The basic hypothesis…

The increasing complexity of human body models enabled by advances in diagnostic imaging, computing, and growing knowledge calls for the development of a new generation of systems for intelligent exploration of these models. Here, we introduce a novel paradigm for the exploration of digital body models illustrating cerebral vasculature. It enables…