Underpinning science education reform movements in the last 20 years--at all levels and within all disciplines--is an explicit shift in the goals of science teaching from students simply creating a knowledge base of scientific facts to students developing deeper understandings of major concepts within a scientific discipline. For example, what use…

This study reviews state and national surveys of prisoner literacy and compares their results to two recent surveys of literacy in Michigan prisoners. The persistent notion that prisoners are severely illiterate is shown to be a myth. In Michigan, only 10 to 11% of commitments were found to have Test of Adult Basic Education scores below grade…

Of the seven liberal arts, on which Western education was based, grammar has always been preeminent. Yet English teachers in recent years have belittled it to the point of an irrelevance. Not only has this higher illiteracy rendered Americans unable to extract ideas from sophisticated prose, David Mulroy worries, but also it leaves us with the…

The model of the Big Bang is an integral part of the national curricula in England and Wales. Previous work (e.g. Baxter 1989) has shown that pupils often come into education with many and varied prior misconceptions emanating from both internal and external sources. Whilst virtually all of these misconceptions can be remedied, there will remain…

I reply to L. Philip Barnes' assessment of the contributions of Ninian Smart and phenomenology to religious education. My argument is that Barnes first misconceives and then underestimates Smart's legacy. I sketch Smart's relevance to some current issues in religious education, suggesting that his thought helps us to avoid potentially damaging…

The authors discuss mass as one of the three fundamental measurements (the others being length and time), noting that estimation of mass is little taught and assessed in primary schools. This article briefly explores the reasons for this in terms of culture, practice, and the difficulty of assessing estimation of mass. An activity using the…

This paper presents a study in a UK university that investigated how first-year (freshman) Information Systems undergraduates perceive learning through courseware containing real-world erroneous examples derived from their peers and what obstacles had to be overcome to implement effective e-Learning support for using and creating such courseware.…

Reading disability and illiteracy are among the most pressing educational issues facing the United States today. At least 40 percent of America's fourth-graders are unable to read at grade level and a similar proportion of adults read at the lowest two levels of prose literacy. Here, the authors present an unflinching examination of the science…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a Computer-Assisted Instruction Material (CAIM) related to "photosynthesis" topic on student cognitive development, misconceptions and attitudes. The study conducted in 2002-2003 academic year and was carried out in two different classes taught by the same teacher, in which…

In this article, the author shares the views of his undergraduate students regarding elder female agency and their answers to the question: "Do old ladies make world history?" Because his undergraduate students mostly view the past in terms of the Great Man theory of history, which holds that those who make history are necessarily great,…

Latinos in the United States have been disproportionately affected by the intersecting epidemics of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases. Using a community-based participatory research approach to problem identification, the objective of this study is to explore sociocultural determinants of HIV/AIDS risk and service use among immigrant Latino…

Although there is a fairly extensive literature on social and educational inclusion of individuals with Down Syndrome (DS) in many countries, very little is produced on the life and education of such individuals in the United Arab Emirates. There is an apparent lack of societal interest in the quality of lives of people with DS. The condition of…

The study investigated the general population's perceived infectivity of asymptomatic and recovered severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) patients and factors associated with avoidance and discriminatory attitudes, including demographic background, SARS-related perceptions and emotional response to the SARS epidemic. A population-based survey…

In order to address HIV infection among college students, a comprehensive measure is needed that can be used with samples from culturally diverse populations. Therefore, this paper assessed the reliability and validity of an HIV/AIDS questionnaire that measures fours dimensions of HIV/AIDS awareness--factual knowledge, prejudice, personal risk,…

What people mean by randomness should be taken into account when teaching statistical inference. This experiment explored subjective beliefs about randomness and probability through two successive tasks. Subjects were asked to categorize 16 familiar items: 8 real items from everyday life experiences, and 8 stochastic items involving a repeatable…