This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study of the relationship between affect and achievement in high school science. The conceptual model for science-related affect proposes that students' enjoyment in, and enthusiasm for science are determined by their perceptions of their past performance in science, their expected future…

Most secondary science courses in North America are designed to use textbooks as the primary or exclusive source of information about the content or processes of science, and most science teachers focus their instruction on a single text. Although there are many serious issues raised by the overwhelming reliance on text-based teaching/learning in…

Teaching about wetlands fits well into curriculum goals for science, social studies, environmental education, and even English/language arts. Given their numerous ecological values, the history of their losses and the fact that they are a current, often controversial environmental issue, wetlands provide an ideal topic for a variety of…

About a quarter of all students who either intend to or actually attend college indicate their intention to pursue a major in science. From this group, there is a slow attrition from the science pipeline as students move along in their educational lives. The aim of the analyses for this project is to characterize the science-oriented behavior of…

This report describes the results of an attempt to identify a learning hierarchy for each of a number of science concepts mainly encountered first in the high school grades. The concepts studied relate to stoichiometric calculations and molarity, both from chemistry; to food web relationships and problems involving Mendel's laws from biology; to…

This survey was developed by the Ohio Sea Grant Education Program in 1979. It is been used every four years as a repeated measure of Ohio students' knowledge and attitudes about the oceans and Great Lakes, charting changes in those attributes as means of determining how well Ohio citizens are being prepared for decisionmaking about those bodies of…

This paper provides background information for setting science education goals. The first part, "History of Reform in Science Education," describes: (1) the National Science Foundation (NSF) curriculum materials and their characteristics in the late 1950s; (2) the milestone studies and the status of science education in the 1970s; and (3) the…

Twin aims--to advance theory and to improve practice in science, mathematics, and computing education--guided the Educational Technology Center's (ETC) research from its inception in 1983. These aims led ETC to establish collaborative research groups in which people whose primary interest was classroom teaching and learning, and researchers…

A description of the Teacher, Industry and Environment (TIE) educational improvement project at Central Missouri State Univesity is provided in this report. TIE is designed for Missouri high school chemistry teachers, involving 73 of them in a weekend workshop, meeting with chemists, engineers, and educators to assist them in using resources…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a laboratory-centered inquiry program on laboratory skills, science process skills, and knowledge/understanding. The inquiry approach used in the Foundational Approaches in Science Teaching (FAST) program and a traditional science textbook approach were compared in terms of the three…

There are two major concerns about the teaching of high school biology. One is the degree to which students memorize laws, facts, and principles, and the second involves the role of the classroom teacher. These aspects result in a discrepancy between the theory and practice of science education. The purpose of this report is to provide: (1) a…

The diversity of the educational system of the United States that engenders a wealth of innovative ideas and varied practices also makes it an extremely complex system to confront and understand as a whole. This survey was undertaken to develop current baseline data on all secondary school teachers of physics in the United States, including those…

This paper attempts to discover and describe the salient common factors constituting four high school science teachers' role conceptions. In a year-long ethnographic study, two researchers worked as participant observers in various science classroom settings at an urban high school. Teachers in charge of these classrooms were interviewed on issues…

This study summarizes data collection activities associated with the first two years of a large scale project involving teachers of science and mathematics with computers. The innovation being implemented in the project is that of using computer based strategies directly in the teaching of science and mathematics in the classroom and laboratory.…

The translation of research findings into practical use has been a persistent problem in education. This paper describes a model that seeks to avoid some of the implementation and dissemination practices of the past--practices that produced disappointing results. The purpose of the study was to develop and test a model that brings together…