In the age of educational accountability, national and statewide measures are assumed to secure and improve the educational quality. However, educators often wonder how much a new accountability measure may improve the actual teaching and learning practices when the agents of change (teachers) are not active participants of such educational…

This study investigated how a collaborative mentoring program influenced beginning science teachers' inquiry-based teaching and their reflection on practice. The one-year program consisted of five one-on-one mentoring meetings, weekly science education seminars, weekly mentoring group discussions, and self-evaluation activities. The participants…

Becoming a social justice teacher, for high-poverty urban settings, is fraught with emotional ambivalence related to personal, professional, relational, political, and cultural social justice issues. Prospective teachers must navigate their sense of justice, grapple with issues of educational disparity, engage with theories of critical,…

This "Focus On" first considers the role two-year colleges (TYCs) play in post-secondary physics education. In their 2007 Survey of Undergraduate Seniors in degree-granting physics departments, the authors asked students if they had begun their post-secondary education at a TYC. Nine percent of the physics undergraduate seniors in 2007…

The 2012 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education was designed to provide up-to-date information and to identify trends in the areas of teacher background and experience, curriculum and instruction, and the availability and use of instructional resources. This compendium, one of a series, details the results of a survey of high school…

The Science-in-CTE pilot study tested a curriculum integration model that enhanced the science that oc-curs in CTE curricula. The study replicated the National Research Center for Career and Technical Ed-ucation's (NRCCTE) Math-in-CTE experimental research design (Stone, Alfeld, & Pearson, 2008) with applied science in secondary agricultural…

A qualitative model of a system is an abstraction that captures ordinal knowledge and predicts the set of qualitatively possible behaviours of the system, given a qualitative description of its structure and initial state. This paper examines an innovative approach to science education using an interactive learning environment that supports…

Science education in schools is often inadvertently designed so that it is frequently inconsistent with students' lived experiences (Aikenhead, 1996, 2001; Brickhouse & Potter, 2001). Science is therefore seen by students as an endeavor for someone else, contributing to a lack of access to the knowledge necessary to address scientific and…

The consistent poor achievement of students in physics tests and in science generally is one problem attracting researchers because of the danger it poses to the nation's technological advancement. This work focused on the effect of content thought on students' achievement. Two research questions were put forward which led to the formulation of…

Climate change and its effects are likely to present challenging problems for future generations of young people. It is important for Australian students to understand the mechanisms and consequences of climate change. If students are to develop a sophisticated understanding, then science teachers need to be well-informed about climate change…

The process of photosynthesis is central to science curriculum at all levels. This article describes an inquiry-based laboratory investigation developed to explore the impact of light quality on photosynthesis and to connect this process to current research on harvesting solar energy, including bioenergy, artificial photosynthesis, and solar…

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between the basic concepts related to the unit of "Chemical Reactions and Energy" and the sub-concepts underlying for meaningful learning of the unit and to investigate the effectiveness of them on students' learning achievements. For this purpose, the basic concepts of the unit…

Mating between closely related individuals often causes reduced fitness, which is termed "inbreeding depression". Inbreeding is, therefore, a threat towards the persistence of animal and plant populations. Here we present methods and results from a practical for high-school and first-year university students and discuss learning outcomes…

Field research offers students true scientific practice opportunities and experiences that cannot always be achieved in the classroom. Though research suggests the importance of incorporating field-based research into science curriculum, classroom constraints make it difficult to incorporate true research opportunities into general science…

At noon throughout the year the Sun has a north-south and east-west motion around the meridian. Earliest/latest sunrises and sunsets do not occur at the solstices and the effect is more pronounced with decreasing latitude. This phenomenon is calculated for 25 Australian cities and the following observations are recorded: (1) The latest sunrise…