Introduces the Australia Science Festival and explains science teachers' involvement in planning, execution, and writing curriculum. Provides information on participation in the festival. (YDS)

Believing that science could be used as a vehicle for increasing student achievement across the curriculum, seven science resource teachers in the South Carolina Lowcountry designed a professional development program funded through a Local Systemic Change grant from the National Science Foundation called Project Inquiry. Science notebooks, used in…

The concepts of sky and visibility distance, as perceived by different learners, are investigated for the first time as a subject of a science education research. Mental models of students with regard to the subject were elicited. They were interpreted in terms of two-level hierarchy: schemes and facets-of-knowledge (defined in the paper). Our…

The Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education (ENC) houses more than 24,000 mathematics and science curriculum resources in this national repository, with new items arriving daily. Identification of effective curriculum resources, creation of high-quality professional development materials and dissemination of useful…

The educational goals and objectives provide a reference for curriculum designers, teachers, and educators, and they are required for evaluation or accreditation processes. This article presents a systematic method to state the learning objectives and analyze the consistency of a secondary school science program developed in Spain. The method is…

A professor of Biology shares his experience at the BioQUEST workshop, which he attended. He talks about the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, which is a large-scale college biology project, focusing on active learning strategies, and the use of technology in teaching. The approaches presented at the workshop are described.

A group of science coordinators in the London Borough of Newham decided that they wanted to create an exciting, stimulating and creative curriculum for teaching science across key stages 1 and 2 (5-11 year-olds). They were motivated to do this because they were concerned about an overloaded curriculum, dominated by literacy and numeracy, with…

The children from Locks Heath Junior School, Southampton, had perceptive and thoughtful views about "Why science?" In this paper, the children share their thoughts about what science is and why they think it is important. This paper presents only a small selection of their far-ranging thoughts on the subject. The emphasis on…

The National Trust manages an infinite variety of coastline, countryside and buildings across England and Wales and encourages young people to become more involved with their "properties". For example, through the Norwich Union School Guardianship scheme, a National Trust property and a local school collaborate on developing projects…

Back in May 2003, the Secretary of State launched "Excellence and enjoyment: a strategy for primary schools". This set out the vision for the future of primary education built on what has already been achieved. In the words of the DfES: "This vision is for a sector where high standards are obtained through a rich, varied and…

In biology teaching, ecological subjects play an important role in dealing with nature in a responsible way. Empirical research has shown that, even after school instruction, students do not understand essential ecological concepts.The main reason is that preconceptions which influence learning are not taken into account in the construction of…

The history of science shows that for each scientific issue there may be more than one models that are simultaneously accepted by the scientific community. One such case concerns the wave and corpuscular models of light. Newton claimed that he had proved some properties of light based on a set of minimal assumptions, without any commitments to any…

For science teachers, implementing inquiry for the first time can seem intimidating. Inquiry-based curriculum requires teachers to design experiences that engage students in scientific phenomena through direct observation, data gathering, and analysis of evidence. Replacing familiar routines and conventional methods with inquiry may seem outside…

In 1993 two of the authors of this article published a survey of introductory biology laboratory instruction in colleges and universities of the U.S. in order to document the status of laboratory instruction, and in particular, the use of inquiry based instruction. In this article, the authors present a survey that examined the changes that may…

This paper describes the use of interactive, Physlet[R]-based curricular material designed to help students learn concepts of thermodynamics with a particular focus on the use of kinetic theory models. These exercises help students visualize ideal gas particle dynamics and engine cycles, make concrete connections between mechanics and…