The purpose of this document is to identify potentially hazardous substances that may be in use in many school laboratories and to provide an inventory of these substances so that science teachers may take the initiative in providing for the proper storage, handling, use, and if warranted, removal of hazardous materials. The document consists of…

This booklet contains three separate papers suitable for use in an advanced high school or college chemistry course. The first paper provides background information on acids and bases. The second paper provides additional background information, focusing on certain aspects of atmospheric chemistry as it relates to the acid rain problem. An attempt…

This exercise is designed to correct the impression of many students that scientific facts are unchanging. Every scientific fact has a history and its history shapes the form which the fact takes in a textbook. Thus, the history of the octet rule is traced to show that scientific knowledge is not a cast iron set of facts but rather a fluid body of…

This biology lesson on carnivorous (insectivorous) plants is designed to supplement the textbook in the areas of plant diversity, ecology, and distribution. An introduction provides general background information for use as lecture material by the teacher or as reading and/or study material for students. The introduction also includes…

This booklet is designed to provide information to girls about the nature of and possible career opportunities in engineering. Following a brief introduction in which the characteristics of engineers are outlined (such as ability to solve problems, interest in science/mathematics, and urge to make creative use of their intelligence), answers to…

It is noted that research concerning correlates of academic achievement has mainly concentrated on such variables as education and occupation of parents, student personality variables, school-related variables, and racial background of students. However, this study focused on the relationship between student achievement in a given subject with…

In December of 1978 the New York State Board of Regents ordered the New York State Education Department to conduct a detailed study of the way in which the subject of origins should be treated in a revised version of the Regents Biology Syllabus. The author was invited to supply scientific information to the Bureau of Science Education, which was…

This study identified the needs and concerns of English speaking public secondary school biology, chemistry, and physics teachers in the five geographic regions of the Republic of Lebanon. Data were collected using a demographic questionnaire, a modified version of the Moore Assessment Profile (an instrument developed to assess the needs of…

A long-standing issue in cognitive psychology is the question of content effects upon problem-solving skills, that is, do students' problem-solving abilities generalize across specific subject matter domains? Although Piaget argued that formal reasoning strategies are independent of content, the well-known decalogs of Piaget can be interpreted as…

After publication in 1982 of the Royal Society report "Science Education 11-18 in England and Wales," the Physics Education Joint Committee of the Royal Society and Institute of Physics was established. A working party of this Joint Committee has now produced this reduced-content 16+ syllabus in physics. The main intention of the working…

The conception of and attitude toward technology of 13-year-old students was investigated. Twelve students were interviewed to find out what they thought of technology and how important it was to them. Other students (N=48) responded to 10 open-ended questions to determine their ideas about technology. Results were then used to construct a…

This syllabus (which is not a teaching syllabus) is intended to be an essential minimum core syllabus in biology for children of all abilities. It consists of: (1) a foreword, which outlines how the syllabus was generated; (2) an introduction, which provides information about the use of the syllabus in biology teaching (for example, the local…

This paper examines how the revolution in human thinking, with the smaller revolution in astronomy begun by Nicolus Copernicus, has plunged science educators into the new Age of Information. Examples which illustrate this development and change in human thinking (from Copernicus' time to the present) are provided from such disciplines as…