This guide includes complete installation descriptions of 30 exhibits. They include: the adjustable birthday cake, ball-in-tube, Bernoulli Box, chain wave, collapsible truss bridge, double wave device, eddy currents raceway, full-length mirror, geodesic domes, giant magnetic tangrams, harmonic cantilever, hyperboloid of revolution, lifting lever,…

Investigations of changes in conceptions during physics instruction are the logical and necessary steps to follow successful international research on students' preinstructional conceptions. The theoretical perspective integrates currently available frameworks of cognition, cognitive states, and cognitive processes in physics. Particular emphasis…

Any number of successful teaching strategies use a mixture of methods rich in language use to enhance conceptual learning. Not all language-rich teaching leads to equivalent conceptual gain. A year-long study was conducted in three high school physics classes to provide empirical support for the existence of effects of varying level of…

This book is a guide to 669 science and technology reference books for children and young people (third grade through high school). It includes some older well-established titles that may be out of print, newer editions, and newer books that have not been completely tested by time. The entries for the books contained in this guide are arranged by…

The proceedings of the International Conference on Energy Alternatives and Risk Education contains papers which examine science teaching in relation to societal aspects of risk assessment. A challenge for the conference was to show how science education can help students learn the concepts of acceptable and unacceptable risks, leading to rational…

From breathtaking glacial ravines of Yosemite Valley to weeds growing in neglected rain gutters, this book of activities combines art with scientific research questions. The book is designed to help educators encourage children in the upper primary grades to learn more about the natural world and in particular their local environment. Sixty…

This paper reports a study designed to examine the types of behaviors students exhibit while conducting laboratory activities and assess the effectiveness of strategies students employ. The sample was 42 students enrolled in a physics lab section at a single university. Three types of data were collected: (1) observational data during the lab…

Knowledge-in-action is a teacher's form of inherently knowing one's actions in the context of daily teaching activities. This article focuses on one physics teacher in a study and describes and analyzes his knowledge-in-action. Observations and interviews were used as data. Among the findings are the teacher's practice can be delineated into two…

This paper reports action research that focuses on gender as a social influence on learning through literacies such as listening, speaking, reading and writing, and orality. Data were collected in three physics classes taught by two teachers, one male and one female, representing three levels of physics. Teachers and researchers worked together in…

The purpose of this study was to examine Edward Lorenz's psychological processes and other environmental aspects in the discovery of chaos at that time. The general concept of chaos is discussed based on relations with previous scientific theories such as Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics. The constraints of discovery in terms of available…

Relations among students' cognitive structures, instruction, and course achievement were studied for 102 undergraduates in three courses. An aim of the study was to integrate expert-novice research with investigations of cognitive-structure change. Experienced instructors identified concepts central to the different courses. Students were asked to…

This booklet comprises the sixth grade component of a series of curriculum guides on fire and burn prevention. Designed to meet the age-specific needs of sixth grade students, its objectives include: (1) developing a comprehensive understanding of fire physics, (2) evaluating electrical hazards and how to respond to those hazards, and (3)…

Part of the Concepts in Science Project at the University of Surrey is to explore the complex structure and organization of ideas and meaning that children bring with them to their science lessons. To examine these ideas and meanings, a distinction is made between children's intuitive understanding of their world (children's science) and the…

The Zimbabwe Secondary School Science Project (ZIM-SCI) developed student study guides, corresponding teaching guides, and science kits for a low-cost science course which could be taught during the third year of secondary school without the aid of qualified teachers and conventional laboratories. This ZIM-SCI study guide is a five-part unit…

This paper presents findings from research on knowledge acquisition in observational astronomy to demonstrate the kinds of intuitive models children form and to show how these models influence the acquisition of science knowledge. Sixty children of approximate ages 6, 9, and 12 were given a questionnaire to investigate their knowledge of the size,…