A concern commonly raised in literature and in media relates to the declining proportions of students who enter and remain in the "science pipeline", and whether many countries, including Australia and New Zealand, have enough budding scientists to fill research and industry positions in the coming years. In addition, there is concern…

A variety of factors are associated with students' achievement in secondary school physics, including cohort size--the total number of students studying Physics in the school--and socioeconomic status. Earlier studies also showed boys achieving better in Physics, while more recent research has shown better results for girls. Statistical analysis…

Whether it is a rapid-fire Twitter event as part of #ASEchat, or BBC Radio 4's "Inside Science," the discussion of practical work generates powerful debate. While it is right that the best use of practical work is continually discussed, its value in science teaching is without question. The level of discussion is being further heightened…

In classrooms, science is usually taught within the cognitive domain while the psychomotor learning domain is achieved through performing science experiments in the laboratory. Although students attend civic and moral education and pastoral care classes where values and life skills are often taught directly, learning experiences in most school…

Technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) has been one of the steering theoretical concepts widely employed by researchers in order to examine and develop teachers' knowledge of integrating technology into teaching. Existing research on TPACK shows little about in-service secondary school science teachers' TPACK through a…

Funding agencies and the science education community at large have pursued strategies for increasing K-12 outreach by scientists and for improving instructional practices in higher education classrooms. However, the simultaneous achievement of both goals is generally not a target for single projects or even single programs. A 4-year project…

This paper addresses contributions that dynamic geometry systems (DGSs) may give in reasoning by contradiction in geometry. We present analyses of three excerpts of students' work and use the notion of pseudo object, elaborated from previous research, to show some specificities of DGS in constructing proof by contradiction. In particular, we…

For some time, it has been clear that students who are tutored generally learn more than students who experience classroom instruction (e.g., Bloom, 1984). Much research has been devoted to identifying features of tutorial dialogue that can explain its effectiveness, so that these features can be simulated in natural-language tutoring systems. One…

This study reports on a content course for science immersion teacher candidates that emphasized authentic practice of science and thinking scientifically in the context of introductory astrophysics. We explore how 122 science teacher candidates spanning three cohorts did and did not reason scientifically and how this evolved in our program. Our…

Dealing with socio-scientific issues in science classes enables students to participate productively in controversial discussions concerning ethical topics, such as sustainable development. In this respect, well-structured decision-making processes are essential for elaborate reasoning. To foster decision-making competence, a computer-based…

This article presents an evaluation of a new upper secondary Earth and Environmental Science (EES) course in Western Australia. Twenty-seven EES teachers were interviewed and 243 students were surveyed about the degree of difficulty, relevance and interest of EES topics in the course. The impact of the course on students' views about EES topics…

In this study we investigate students' ability to discern conceptual variation and the use of multiple models in genetics when reading content-specific excerpts from biology textbooks. Using the history and philosophy of science as our reference, we were able to develop a research instrument allowing students themselves to investigate the…

Context-aware ubiquitous learning has been recognized as being a promising approach that enables students to interact with real-world learning targets with supports from the digital world. Several researchers have indicated the importance of providing learning guidance or hints to individual students during the context-aware ubiquitous learning…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of online scaffolds in computer simulation to facilitate students' science learning. We first introduced online scaffolds to assist and model students' science learning and to demonstrate how a system embedded with online scaffolds can be designed and implemented to help high school…

The belief that STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education initiatives have the potential to stimulate both regional and national economies has prompted policy makers and funding agencies to revisit how STEM teachers are recruited, prepared, and retained. This article investigates the impact of a unique prescholarship…