Educating and communicating about climate change is challenging. Researchers reported that climate change concepts are often misunderstood. Some people do not believe that climate change will have impacts on their own life. Other challenges may include people's difficulty in perceiving small or gradual environmental changes, the fact that…

In this article has been extracted from a longer paper by the same name that came about in response to the Badman Review of Elective Home Education (Badman 2009). The first part briefly discusses the Badman Review. The next looks at the misunderstandings that can occur once concerns are raised in home education. Finally there are case studies…

The Race to the Top (RTTT) Assessment Program has funded two state consortia to develop new assessment systems that measure student skills against a common set of college- and career-ready standards in mathematics and English language arts (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). The initial RTTT invitation to submit proposals prompted extensive…

Learning occurs through various processes. Among these processes, conceptual change has a pivotal part. This article discusses briefly conceptual change in physics. Anchoring on Kuhn's original explanation of theory change in science, this article elaborates especially on the influence of children's science concepts in general, and pre-conceptions…

In American popular culture, the word "rural" invokes images of sunny farms and little red school-houses--while "urban" means drugs, poverty, and crime. But rural schools face many of the same challenges as their urban counterparts. The problems of rural schools are often invisible to the public and policy makers. The solutions…

Constructivism is a widely influential perspective in science education research. However, there have been strong criticisms of attempts to adopt constructivism as a principle underpinning official science curriculum policy (for example in New Zealand). Over the past decade recommendations for classroom pedagogy in extensive official guidance…

The purpose of this study was to explore students' knowledge and learning of the human nervous system (HNS) in an introductory undergraduate Human Anatomy and Physiology course. Classroom observations, demographic data, a preinstructional unit test with drawings, and a postinstructional unit test with drawings were used to identify students'…

In many respects epilepsy is as much a social disorder as it is a physical one. With epilepsy's long human history, many misconceptions have grown around the disorder. Those misconceptions have taken on a life of their own. Mistaken ideas that epilepsy is some form of evil possession, that it is a form of mental illness, that people with epilepsy…

An online interactive geometry item was developed to explore students' abilities to create prototypical and "tilted" rectangles out of line segments. The item was administered to 1,002 students. The responses to the item were hand-coded as correct, incorrect, or incorrect with possible evidence of a misconception. A variation of the nearest…

The author, a teacher educator, explains that because of a lack of training in language studies, many teachers do not view language as linguists do. She identifies three misconceptions (and the implications they have for English language learners) that still persist in education: Standard English is the best and most correct form of English,…

Previously assumed to be a homogenous and highly skilled group with respect to information and communications technology, the so-called Net Generation has instead been shown to possess a diverse range of technology skills and preferences. To better understand this diversity, we subjected data from 2096 students aged between 17 and 26 from three…

Educators teaching about social difference and about minorities in society face a variety of challenges in effectively teaching students accurate and balanced understandings of different groups in society, including, particularly, the competing influence of the mass media on young people's minds. Whether one views representations in contemporary…

Visual representations are ubiquitous in modern-day science textbooks and have in recent years become an object of criticism and scrutiny. This article examines the extent to which changes in representations in textbooks published in the USA over the past six decades have invited those critiques. Drawing from a correlational analysis of a corpus…

First-year university students have misconceptions about the source and dynamics of publicly funded research money. We designed an activity in which students take part in a mock grant panel. The results indicated a strong tendency toward student funding of applied medical research at the expense of basic research. Exposure to a few examples of…

This article presents four stories of personal experiences of China. In "A Journey Between China's Past and Present," Peter Hessler, a former Peace Corps volunteer and author, highlights misconceptions between Chinese and Americans and the desire both peoples share for knowledge about one another. In "Life on Liberation…