Eliot, a neuroscientist who has analyzed gender differences in children's brains, asserts that--contrary to the widely held idea that boys' and girls' brains are hardwired differently--few differences exist in the neural structures and neurochemistry of boys' and girls' brains. Actual ability differences between the genders are quite small as…

This paper explores Paulo Freire's philosophy of hope. This is significant because, for Freire, it was human hope that rendered education possible, necessary and necessarily political. Like other areas of his thought, however, his reading of hope contained ambiguities and contradictions, and the paper explores these by locating Freire's thought in…

Formative assessment probes are used not only to uncover the ideas students bring to their learning, they can also be used to reveal teachers' common misconceptions. Consider a process widely used in inquiry science--developing hypotheses. In this article, the author features the probe "Is It a Hypothesis?", which serves as an example of how…

The "Testable Question Relay" was created as part of a fourth-grade unit on conducting science experiments. In the relay, student teams raced to "outfit a scientist" by correctly categorizing questions as testable or untestable and earning scientific tools. This activity assists upper-elementary students in recognizing the components of good…

This article first notes the misinterpretation of a common thought experiment, and the misleading comment that "systems tend to flow from less probable to more probable macrostates". It analyses the experiment, generalizes it and introduces a new tool of investigation, the simplectic structure. A time-symmetric model is built upon this structure,…

Various studies suggest that covariational reasoning plays an important role on understanding the fundamental ideas of calculus and modeling dynamic functional events. The purpose of this study was to investigate a group of mathematics teachers' covariational reasoning abilities and predictions about their students. Data were collected through…

Student teachers were tested before and after a teaching unit on electrostatic interactions in an attempt to consider their intuitive ideas and concept development. A study was made of students' explanations of basic interactions: those between two charged bodies, and those between a charged body and a neutral body. Two indicators of the cognitive…

This study explored Bangladeshi science teachers' conceptions of nature of science (NOS) with a particular focus on the nature of (a) scientific knowledge, (b) scientific inquiry and (c) scientific enterprise. The tentative, inferential, subjective and creative NOS, in addition to the myths of the scientific method and experimentation, the nature…

Several misconceptions abound among college students taking their first general physics course, and to some extent pre-engineering physics students, regarding the physics and applications of electric circuits. Analogies used in textbooks, such as those that liken an electric circuit to a piped closed loop of water driven by a water pump, do not…

Energy saving and carbon-emissions reduction (ESCER) are widely regarded as important issues for progress towards ensuring sustainable forms of economic development. This Taiwanese study focuses on the effects of a series of educational activities about ESCER on students' knowledge, attitudes and behavior. Sixty fifth-grade students from two…

This article reviews themes and changes in the teaching of HIV/AIDS content in social work programs over the first three decades of the epidemic. Social work education in the first decade of the epidemic was largely focused on helping clients in the death and dying process, while medical and pharmaceutical advancements in the mid-1990s drastically…

This qualitative, phenomenological study examined the experiences of four African American undergraduate students and two White professors, all current or former affiliates of a predominantly White university (PWI) in the Midwest. The objective was to gain an understanding of whether their experiences were ones that have been addressed in the past…

The purpose of this qualitative study--"Culture and Early Language Development: Implications for Assessment and Intervention"--was to explore and describe the perceptions and beliefs of Salvadoran mothers of low socioeconomic status regarding the language development of their young children in order to identify cultural variations in…

This study examined the linguistic competence in Korean of Korean heritage language learners (HLLs), compared to English-speaking non-heritage language learners (NHLLs) of Korean. It is unclear and controversial as to whether heritage languages learners are exposed to early but are interrupted manifest as L1 competence or share more…

This study investigated the effects of analogy on the elimination of students' misconceptions about direct current circuits, students' achievement and the attitudes towards physics lessons. The sample of this study consisted of 51 11th grade students from two different classes. While one of the classes was the experimental group where analogy was…