This study examines the effectiveness of handbook preparation as a method in the self-directed learning process of student teachers in teaching endocrine glands, and increasing their levels of knowledge. Thirty student teachers were selected from a biology department. A pencil and paper test and a clinical interview procedure were used to collect…

Children's perceptions of industry often remain unclear, incorrect, or shrouded in misconception. A high proportion of children continue to describe industry using "negative" adjectives including dark, noisy, dirty, and smoky. In this article, the author describes a project that tackles these misconceptions by working with young…

Evolution curricula are replete with information about Darwin's theory of evolution as well as microevolutionary mechanisms underlying this process of change. However, other fundamental facets of evolutionary theory, particularly those related to macroevolution are often missing. One crucial idea typically overlooked is that of most recent common…

This study examined how 21 college-level general chemistry students, who had received instruction that emphasized the symbolic level of ionic equations, explained their submicroscopic-level understanding of precipitation reactions. Students' explanations expressed through drawings and semistructured interviews revealed the nature of the…

Is the phenomenon of magnification by a converging lens inconsistent and therefore unreliable? Can a lens magnify one part of an object but not another? Physics teachers and even students familiar with basic optics would answer "no," yet many answer "yes." Numerous telescope users believe that magnification is not a reliable phenomenon in that it…

This study investigated Indonesian and Japanese students' understandings of macroscopic and submicroscopic levels of representing matter and its changes and the difficulties they have with these concepts. A multiple-choice questionnaire was constructed and delivered to 447 Indonesian and 446 Japanese public senior high school students. The data…

In the Western world, a paradigm exists that sees environment treated as one extreme of an adversarial binary, balanced in opposition to society. This paradigm, which I call the "environment/society disconnect," infiltrates the secondary school system, leading to serious deficiencies in how students understand the social dimensions of…

From the late nineteenth century through the early 1930s a succession of collectors, ethnologists, and other scholars scoured the Menominee Reservation for data and items of material culture, which they presented to the American public through both publication and display. They did this with the cautious aid of Menominees they hired to provide…

Remember the time when all you had to do was memorize these five steps: ask a question, formulate a hypothesis, perform experiment, collect data, and draw conclusions? And you received full credit for defining the scientific method. Well, those days are gone. This article discusses why the "scientific method ain't what it used to be." (Contains 2…

Two experiments examined whether inconsistent effects of analogies in promoting new content learning from text are related to prior knowledge of the analogy "per se." In Experiment 1, college students who demonstrated little understanding of weather systems and different levels of prior knowledge (more vs. less) of an analogous everyday…

This research review is dedicated to the memory of William Safire (1929-2009). A visionary leader, Safire brought other visionaries, researchers, educators, artists, and policymakers together to explore the confluence of arts education and neuroscience. He fostered the new field of neuroeducation in his work as chair of The Dana Foundation in…

The meaning of Lorentz contraction in special relativity and its connection with Bell's spaceships parable is discussed. The motion of Bell's spaceships is then compared with the accelerated motion of a rigid body. We have tried to write this in a simple form that could be used to correct students' misconceptions due to conflicting earlier…

The measurement of the mass, or the density, of air can easily be done with very simple materials and offers many interesting phenomena for discussion--buoyancy and its effects being the most obvious but not the only one. Many interesting considerations can be done regarding the behavior of gases, the effect of the external conditions in the…

"Proceedings of International Conference on Research in Education and Science" includes full papers presented at the International Conference on Research in Education and Science (ICRES) which took place on March 24-27, 2022 in Antalya, Turkey. The aim of the conference is to offer opportunities to share ideas, to discuss theoretical and…

Comments on the critiques of Tryon (2009a, this issue) and Cunningham (2009, this issue). These critiques provide an interesting contrast: one favoring greater reductionism and one favoring less. I consider each in turn. Tryon (2009a) again has addressed the issue of mechanisms in these pages (cf. Tryon, 2009b). The concepts of function and…