Describes the Irish National Stud and its relationship to science education. Includes the history of the stud and a full description of its grounds. (MM)

Reading, as one learning activity in science lessons and units of study, needs to be assessed to notice needs of pupils. The science teacher needs to be thoroughly grounded in science content and methodology and yet also needs to be an instructor of reading. For pupils to do well in reading science subject matter, there needs to be continuous…

This paper is focused on primary trainee teachers' conceptualization of the vision process and image formation in a plane mirror. The study involved 55 non-specialist, undergraduate trainee primary teachers on a 4-year programme of initial teacher training. The process incorporated tracking trainees' ideas during university-taught sessions through…

Everything moves. Even apparently stationary objects such as houses, roads, or mountains are moving because they sit on a spinning planet orbiting the Sun. Not surprisingly, the concepts of motion and the forces that affect moving objects are an integral part of the middle school science curriculum. However, middle school students are often taught…

Within the overall STTIS (Science Teacher Training in an Information Society) framework, this paper focuses on transformations of innovative teaching of optics, following a recommended change of approach to optics in the French curriculum. The empirical investigation of how teachers responded to this change, the main results of which are briefly…

This chapter describes the implementation and assessment of a high school-level bioengineering curriculum unit in urban, suburban, and rural settings. (Contains 8 figures.)

There has been a call for approaches that connect science learning with literacy, yet the use of, and research on, children's literature information books in science instruction has been quite limited. Because the discipline of science involves distinctive generic linguistic registers, what information books should be integrated in science…

The study describes how most current biological curricula fail to foster citizenry, how this failure is problematic for conservation, and offers one approach to address the problem. Local city planners and state Department of Fish and Game have proposed a marsh restoration project near the university to compare and contrast how wildlife would…

The Society Committee on Education (SOCED) of the American Chemistry Society (ACS) held an invitational meeting, "Exploring the Molecular Vision" to re-construct the chemistry curriculum, in keeping with modern interdisciplinary practices. The meeting confirmed that chemistry education must interact with diverse disciplines, and portray its value…

For as long as people have sought to understand the world in which they live, stories have played an important role in helping to clarify and communicate their ideas. In ancient times, stories such as the four humours of the body provided a way of explaining health and disease. In the modern world, stories have largely been replaced by rational,…

Adolescent and parent focus groups were conducted to do a needs assessment and discover possible topics for a secondary school family class. Results included identifying teen and parent family-related needs and societal concerns; discovering where teens currently learn about family life; and receiving teen and parent feedback about a proposed…

The authors describe an innovative perspective for the evaluation of professional development programming in science. This perspective focused on a self-critical analysis of the reflective practices developed and used among program participants. This approach ties program quality directly to issues impacting the implementation of curriculum reform…

This paper is based on fieldwork undertaken in the course of an evaluation of the science curriculum of the lower secondary level in Spain. This level of the Spanish school system has experienced an intense process of reform over the last 10 years. The paper analyses the process of change affecting the subject of Natural Sciences in the context of…

I examine how science curricula are complicit in maintaining the dominance of knowledge production by major powers, particularly the USA, through their efforts to tell the "truth" about certain topics, and whether resistant counter-discourses are being mounted, especially in "peripheral" states such as Canada, Australia, and…

After spending three years as a kindergarten teacher and one as a reading specialist, Michelle Waters recently became the education outreach coordinator for the Georgia-based Clean Air Campaign. In that role, she has helped roll out a comprehensive Better Air Schools initiative to 20 Atlanta-area elementary schools. The program includes a…