The number of students enrolling in Computer Science in colleges and Universities has declined since its peak in the early 2000s. Some claim contributing factors that intimate that prospective students fear the lack of employment opportunities if they study computing in college. However, the lack of understanding of what Computer Science is and…

The assimilation and synthesis of knowledge is essential for students to be successful in chemistry, yet not all students synthesize knowledge as intended. The study used the Learning Preference Checklist to classify students into one of three learning modalities--visual, auditory, or kinesthetic (VAK). It also used the Kolb Learning Style…

In this paper I respond to Long's paper in which he uses an ethnographic snapshot of a rally of scientists against the perceived "dumbing down" effect of the new Answers in Genesis Museum in Kentucky to raise educational concerns about the effects of creationist influence on the science curriculum in American schools. In my response I…

Of concern is an international trend of students' increasing reluctance to choose science courses in both their final years of secondary school and tertiary levels of education. Research into the phenomenon indicates an influencing factor to be the "uninteresting curriculum" (OECD, 2006) of school science. This article presents an…

Since the World Conference on Higher Education organized by UNESCO in 1998, higher educational institutions around the world have been called upon to produce educators (teachers) who are able to motivate their learners to: (1) develop an awareness about, and a valid understanding of the Nature of Science (NOS); and (2) relate such knowledge to the…

"Teenagers' abstract thinking ability test" was designed in accordance with the structure and performance of teenagers' ability to think abstractly. 138 Chinese junior high school students who learned New curriculum and old curriculum separately were measured. A comparison between the two kinds of students shows that abstract thinking…

With increased emphasis on state standards and assessments in science, one might question whether there is still a role for national science standards and benchmarks. This article makes a case for the importance of national guidelines and identifies key functions performed by the National Research Council's "National Science Education Standards"…

Attitudes to science scales developed earlier in England have been used in and around a Pakistan city with children in Primary/Elementary Grades 4-8. The limitations of a "transferred scale" in a culturally different context are apparent in a failure to reproduce the English factor patterns, but items are identified to serve as a base…

This study reports findings from an analysis of the 2002 Chinese National Physics Curriculum Guidelines and the alignment between the curriculum guidelines and two most recent provincial-level 12th-grade exit examinations in China. Both curriculum guidelines and test content were represented using two-dimensional matrices (i.e., topic by level of…

This paper questions the perceived divide between "science" subject matter and "moral" or "ethical" subject matter. A difficulty that this assumed divide produces is that science teachers often feel that there needs to be "special treatment" given to certain issues which are of an ethical or moral nature and which are "brought into" the science…

Along with the need to make their curriculum more comprehensive and reflective of the national and state standards, one school district also searched for ways to make students more passionate about learning science. As a result, they developed a new integrated science course that is centered around the environmental and Earth sciences with an…

Considerable effort has been made over the past decade to address the needs of learners in large urban districts through scaleable reform initiatives. We examine the effects of a multifaceted scaling reform that focuses on supporting standards based science teaching in urban middle schools. The effort was one component of a systemic reform effort…

The aim of the present contribution is to investigate similarities and differences of strengths in science competences between countries, based on TIMSS 2003 data. Analyses are based on systematic investigation of patterns of p values for individual science items. Hierarchical cluster analysis was applied to establish meaningful groups of…

The problem addressed in this study was that little was known about the impact on student academic achievement, when grouped by learning style, in a multiple intelligence based science curriculum. The larger problem was that many students were frequently unengaged and, consequently, low achieving in their science courses. This quantitative study…

This article presents a model for the development of an environmentally oriented unit designed to be implemented as an integral part of the science core curriculum. The program's main goal is encouraging students at the junior high-school level to develop systems-thinking and environmental insight as a basis for environmental literacy. A…