The purposes of the study were to (a) identify student attitudes toward older people according to three measures, (b) determine the relationships among the attitudes as shown by these measures, and (c) identify the relationships between age, gender, frequency of communication with older adults, and life experience with older adults. A total of 125…

Evidence suggests that there is a link between certain madrasas in Pakistan and militant Islamic fundamentalism. However, this link has been inflated by Western media in an attempt to indict madrasas as the genesis of violent Islamic radicalism. The following study draws upon recent research and overlooked historical narratives, demonstrating that…

Presents an activity that enables teachers to access students' existing knowledge of bats, have students confront their misconceptions and learn more about the real lives of bats, and ask students to apply their knowledge while reinforcing the difference between science and myth. (JRH)

Explores the fundamentalist Christian focus on perfectionism and its possible contribution to an increase in dysfunctional individuals, family systems, and societies. Several Bible verses are analyzed and the results of their misinterpretation discussed. The need for a program of spiritual growth, as expressed by Alcoholics Anonymous, as opposed…

Presents the Chemical Concepts Inventory (CCI), an inventory that faculty can use to judge the extent of several common alternate conceptions among their students. Demonstrates that students come to general chemistry with a variety of the alternate conceptions described in the research literature. Shows that a traditional general chemistry course…

Relatively little is known about students' conceptions of research and, in particular, whether there are conceptually discrete patterns of variation that can be used to model this phenomenon in terms of research-as-learning outcomes. The present study explores the dimensionality of students' conceptions of research from two complementary research…

This paper comments on the article "Psychology and Phenomenology: A Clarification" by H. H. Kendler. In this article, Kendler misrepresented contemporary existential-humanistic psychology and conventional (or natural) scientific psychology. With regard to the former, he presented a confused, unwittingly biased, and all-too-stereotypic picture.…

A good understanding of dimensional analysis is a needed prerequisite to adequately perform and report quantitative chemical analyses in support of chemical processes. Some common teaching and learning misconceptions related to the volumetric dilution equation are discussed.

As currently practiced, value-added assessment relies on a strong assumption about the scales used to measure student achievement, namely that these are interval scales, with equal-sized gains at all points on the scale representing the same increment of learning. Many of the metrics in which test results are expressed do not have this property…

Accelerating students through school at a faster than normal rate is routinely met with skepticism and doubt pertaining to its effectiveness. In the research community, however, the topic is nearly dead. Research has continually supported this practice as effective when carefully implemented. This article attempts to debunk common myths (such as…

Current school science curricula attempt to reflect contemporary constructivist-provisionalist related epistemologies as accepted by professional science. It is argued that conversely, the effect of science education is the creation of pupils holding naive-realist epistemological beliefs, largely inductivist-positivist absolutists who chase an…

Students' understanding of object-oriented (OO) program execution was studied by asking students to draw a picture of a program state at a specific moment. Students were given minimal instructions on what to include in their drawings in order to see what they considered to be central concepts and relationships in program execution. Three drawing…

The goal of this study was to examine the two related links of "research to teaching practice" and "teaching practice to research" that pre-service elementary teachers made during an action research project focusing on a conceptual-change teaching experience with elementary school students. Data were collected from the final written reports from…

A metaphor of "riding the wave" is used as a means of envisioning the future of sport and exercise psychology given what we know about past and present waves in the field. First, I review the waves of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s to understand critical issues in the field and to evaluate the waves as smooth, choppy, or turbulent today. Second,…

Phylogenetic trees, which are depictions of the inferred evolutionary relationships among a set of species, now permeate almost all branches of biology and are appearing in increasing numbers in biology textbooks. While few state standards explicitly require knowledge of phylogenetics, most require some knowledge of evolutionary biology, and many…