Although teacher educators have achieved some success in improving teachers' understanding of the nature of science (NOS), helping teachers teach NOS has proved a much greater challenge. Currently, there are few examples in the literature of teachers who effectively teach NOS, and fewer still that rely on student outcomes as a measure of teachers'…

Korea is recognized as one of the most advanced countries in terms of informatization. The development of informatization has impacted education, and education informatization has contributed to the improvement of teaching in the classroom. Accordingly, education informatiozation is one of the paramount pedagogical issues in South Korea. This…

No nation can develop beyond the quality of its education system, which depends on the quality of teachers. Much of what teachers need to know to be successful is invisible to lay observers leading to the view that teaching requires little formal study. On the contrary, teachers seek answers to questions to enable them help students learn. They…

This paper compares the concepts of "subject-matter didactics" (Fachdidaktik) with "pedagogical content knowledge". The former is based on German didaktik and has a long tradition. The latter was introduced by Lee Shulman in the late 1980s and has no tradition in the same way as its German counterpart. Both of the concepts deal…

This study is a snapshot of a community of practice in operation. It reports a school-based professional development activity as a learning community with specific attention on one particular member, a "broker", who, by mediating the process of negation, helped bridge a huge knowledge gap regarding subject matter and school context between the…

This essay explores the nature of what teachers know by examining trends in teacher knowledge research, specifically the use of conventional metaphors to describe teacher knowledge. Contending that conventional metaphors fail to acknowledge the complex and multidimensional nature of teacher knowledge, the author argues that novel metaphors should…

Due to its complex and microscopic nature, genetics is a difficult subject for many learners to conceptually grasp. Graphics, animation and video material can be extremely helpful to their understanding. A wealth of educational online content about genetics has been created over the past decade in the wake of the human genome being sequenced.…

Two well-known major frameworks to measure teacher performance and determine what a teacher should know and be able to do are undoubtedly the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and Charlotte Danielson's Framework for teaching. Charlotte Danielson has four major domains and National Board Certification (NBPTS) has five major core…

This study evaluated the effects of a short-term professional development session. Forty volunteer high school biology teachers were randomly assigned to one of two professional development conditions: (a) developing deep content knowledge (i.e., control condition) or (b) evaluating student errors and understanding in writing samples (i.e.,…

This study developed twelve instructional modules based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress for mathematics content and methods courses for preservice elementary and middle school teachers and examined their impact on PSTs' mathematical content knowledge and self-efficacy beliefs about teaching mathematics. The modules help…

Critical reading of science-based media reports is an authentic context in which to explore the mutual interests of teachers of science and English, who want to use science in the media to promote their subject discipline while encouraging cross-curricular learning. This empirical study focused on 90 teachers of science and English to explore…

One of the applications applied most nowadays is web based instruction (WBI). Although there are many studies on WBI, no study which researched the relations between beliefs for WBI, WBI tools acceptance levels and web pedagogical content knowledge (WPCK) of science and technology pre-service teachers was found among these studies. The aim of this…

HIV/AIDS education should empower students to create knowledge using everyday life experiences. Such knowledge should then be used to construe experience and resolve social problems such as risk behaviour that leads to infection. In South Africa, attempts to reduce the spread of HIV include incorporating HIV/AIDS education in the biology…

Although early field experiences are touted as vital for providing a hands-on preview of how teaching unfolds in the classroom, these essential components of teacher preparation programs have consistently fallen short of the desired outcomes. In the spirit of Dewey, candidates need substantive experiences that transform their theoretical learning…

The impetus for the study reported in this paper was Queensland's poor performance on 2008's NAPLAN testing, the Queensland Education Performance Review (Department of Education and Training, [DET]2009b) that followed and the subsequent adoption of pre-registration tests for aspiring Primary and Early Childhood teachers (Queensland College of…