The growth in science understanding and reasoning of 12 children is being traced through their primary school years. The paper reports findings concerning children's growing understandings of evaporation, and their changing responses to exploration activities, that show the complexity and coherence of learning pathways. Children's responses to…

Research suggests potential problems when group work is used in school science to support the integrated acquisition of conceptual understanding and testing procedures. Yet integrated acquisition is promoted by current policy, and is a popular classroom strategy. Work by Howe et al. (Learning and Instruction 10 (2000) 361) indicates that the…

Contrary to popular belief, plants are very much in tune and in time with their immediate environment. The most important environmental cues for plants are light and gravity. In this article, the authors discuss the effects of light on plant development and use the spores of the sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis) in laboratory exercises to…

In this study, high school and first-year undergraduate students were asked about their understanding of stars. The hypothesis guiding this research posits that high school students who have taken a semester-long astronomy course will have an understanding of stars most related to scientific knowledge, compared with high school students enrolled…

This study examines the effects of teaching Linkage and Problem Translating Skills on students' problem-solving performance and their learning of the five cognitive variables namely, Concept Relatedness, Idea Association, Problem Translating Skill, Non-Specific but Relevant Knowledge and Specific Knowledge. Seventy three Grade 9 (Secondary 3)…

In this investigation, we examined children's knowledge of cosmology in relation to the shape of the earth and the day-night cycle. Using explicit questioning involving a choice of alternative answers and 3D models, we carried out a comparison of children aged 4-9 years living in Australia and England. Though Australia and England have a close…

As one of the main disciplines, science is very important for people to make sense of their life. The appropriate use of the models in science classrooms to promote children's understanding, imagination and creativity definitely depends on the teachers who have experience of differentiating the scope and the limitations of the models. From this…

We investigated the common difficulties that students have with concepts related to rotational and rolling motion covered in the introductory physics courses. We compared the performance of calculus- and algebra-based introductory physics students with physics juniors who had learned rotational and rolling motion concepts in an intermediate level…

In their paper, Martinez, Solanto, and Jiminez compared a number of methodologies used to describe students' understandings of scientific conceptions. One of the issues raised by the authors was the lack of a theoretical platform based in the area of cognition upon which the data were analysed. This paper investigates students' understandings of…

The tendency to view science as specialized and inaccessible is common. As a result, many people do not persevere in trying to understand it. Although administrators give it a nod in terms of being important, they often see it as something for students who have certain kinds of intelligence and, unlike reading, accept less-than-deep understanding…

A photovoltaic panel can convert sunlight directly into electricity. If one connects enough of them in a series-parallel arrangement called a solar array, they can provide about half of a home's annual electricity needs. The panels comprise specially treated electronic materials that when exposed to sunlight will give up electrons freely, and…

This article describes a simple way to demonstrate powder diffraction in a classroom setting using a dry film of spherical colloids on a glass substrate. Use of transparent, elastomeric poly(dimethylsiloxane) as a supporting substrate for the spheres rather than glass enables demonstration of the reciprocal lattice effect. (Contains 4 figures and…

Evolution is considered by virtually all biologists to be the central unifying principle of biology, yet its fundamental concepts are not widely understood or widely disseminated. Teaching evolution--defined as descent with modification from a common ancestor as a result of natural selection acting on genetic variation--has traditionally been a…

We describe a principled way of imposing a metric representing dissimilarities on any discrete set of stimuli (symbols, handwritings, consumer products, X-ray films, etc.), given the probabilities with which they are discriminated from each other by a perceiving system, such as an organism, person, group of experts, neuronal structure, technical…

In this age of cell phones, digital television, and satellite radio, individuals easily forget that information and energy must undergo complex transformations to enable real-time wireless communication. This article describes a practical and proven design activity that enables secondary and post-secondary students to design and test a modulator…