Not all demonstrations involve using exciting visual displays of one or a series of scientific principles. Demonstrations can be as simple as showing the interrelationship between scientific concepts or principles using concept maps. Concepts maps are tools that help people conceptualize and remember a conglomeration of facts making up complex…

Young children's naive beliefs about physics are commonly studied as isolated pieces of knowledge. The current paper takes a different approach. It asks whether preschoolers interlink individual beliefs into larger configurations or Gestalts. Such Gestalts bring together knowledge such as how an object's mass relates to its sinking speed, how an…

The teaching of science in the United States is dominated by examples of the contributions of European and American scientists. The multitude of contributions of knowledge and ways of thinking of the many other cultures of the world have been largely ignored. This paper presents evidence from the Yupiaq culture in southwestern Alaska that…

The selection criteria of high intellectual ability and strong academic achievement for gifted educational programs often leads teachers to assume that their gifted students understand important science concepts. However, empirical evidence of such homogeneity among gifted students' deep understanding of scientific concepts is lacking in the…

Most high school chemistry curricula contain a unit on gas volume and a unit on the particulate nature of matter. The existence and persistence of adolescent preconceptions about the material nature of gases is an important factor to be considered in the teaching of principles or theories related to gases. The purpose of the study reported in this…

Bacterial transformation is a commonly used technique in genetic engineering that involves transferring a gene of interest into a bacterial host so that the bacteria can be used to produce large quantities of the gene product. Although several kits are available for performing bacterial transformation in the classroom, students do not always…

This curriculum consists of a series of Learning Activity Packets (LAPs) on the chemistry involved in different aspects of modern society. It is intended for non-majors and introduces fundamental concepts by engaging students in hands-on learning activities. The LAPs are designed to make connections between chemistry and other fields of interest…

Recognizing basic elements as building blocks is essential to the study of science, and looking closer at one element in particular, chlorine, can help ignite students' interest in chemistry. This document contains a 2-day study of building block chemistry using basic concepts and easy-to-find materials. Teaching materials include objectives,…

Because of the increased influence of the whole language approach at the elementary and middle school levels and the increased emphasis on enriching instruction through reading across the curriculum, one alternative approach to teaching science which has received some attention from science and science education organizations is the use of…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of two different types of post-instruction concept interviews: one that did and one that did not embed a concept mapping process as means of eliciting students' post-instruction conceptual understandings about the nature of, source of, and problems caused by chlorofluorocarbons…

This paper is based on the belief that knowledge must be organized in order to be accessible from long term memory and this kind of organization requires connected understanding. It reports on the development and validity of the select-and-fill-in concept map format designed to measure middle school students' connected understanding of selected…

This supplement to the first and second editions of "Invitations to Science Inquiry" contains about 100 more discrepant events (occurrences or happenings which go against what we usually think likely) presented in the second edition plus 50 additional discrepant events. Discrepant events function by causing dissonance between what is…

Models occupy the content core of physics, and modeling is a major process for constructing and employing physics knowledge. A model is characterized by its domain, composition, structure, behavior, and organization. Problem solving is a schematic modeling process consisting of model selection, construction, validation, analysis, and deployment. A…

Most conventional school science curricula and the teaching practices that implement them offer students no firsthand contact with working science. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: (1) How can "school science" claim to offer a basis for education in or about science at all? (2) What is the status of this claim in relation to…

A general model for research in the concept of weight and other concepts is tested with second grade children. (Author/DEP)