Pseudoscience beliefs (e.g., astrology, ghosts or UFOs) are rife in American society. Most research examines creation/evolution among liberal arts majors, general public adults, or, infrequently, middle or high school science teachers. Thus, research truncates the "range" of ersatz science thinking and the samples it studies. We examined diverse…

The general public's responses to people with intellectual disabilities influence the likely success or failure of policies aimed at increasing their social inclusion. The present paper provides a review of general population based research into awareness, attitudes and beliefs regarding intellectual disability published in English between 1990…

The mathematical topic of inverse functions is an important element of algebra courses at the high school and college levels. The inverse function concept is best understood by students when it is presented in a familiar, real-world context. In this article, the authors discuss some misconceptions about inverse functions and suggest some…

This study investigated and compared the geometry knowledge and levels of pre-service elementary teachers from the United States and Taiwan. Forty pre-service teachers in Taiwan and 48 pre-service teachers in the United States at the beginning of their teacher education programs completed the Entering Geometry Test (EGT) and the van Hiele Geometry…

Global warming is one of the important environmental problems whose dangerous effects are increasing gradually. The study reported herein aimed to reveal student teachers' conceptions about global warming and the effect of biology teacher education program on their awareness of this environmental issue. An open-ended questionnaire was used to…

Behavioral scientists have struggled with units of measurement for as long as they have struggled with measurement itself. Psychology's sole attempt at an explicit unit of measurement--the Lexile Framework for Reading (Stenner, Burdick, Sanford, & Burdick, 2006)--has been and continues to be ignored by the psychometric "cognoscenti."…

This article presents Stephen Humphry's response to the commentaries for his article "The Role of the Unit in Physics and Psychometrics." The commentaries covered a range of important considerations and implications. Given that the author fully agrees with the majority of the content, attention will be confined mainly to points that call…

This study investigated the association between sex stereotypes and the sexual behaviour of Nigerian school-going adolescents. It also ascertained the effects of age and sex on adolescents' beliefs about sex stereotypes. The study sample consisted of 658 (male = 287, female = 371) adolescents from nine randomly selected secondary schools in three…

Introduction. Missing data is a common problem in research and can produce severely misleading analyses, including biased estimates of statistical parameters, and erroneous conclusions. In its 1999 report, the APA Task Force on Statistical Inference encouraged authors to report complications such as missing data and discouraged the use of…

This study investigated the claim (e.g., Vosniadou & Brewer's, 1992) that children have naive ''mental models'' of the earth and believe, for example, that the earth is flat or hollow. It tested the proposal that children appear to have these misconceptions because they find the researchers' tasks and questions to be confusing and ambiguous.…

We investigated students' knowledge constructions of basic quantum chemistry concepts, namely atomic orbitals, the Schrodinger equation, molecular orbitals, hybridization, and chemical bonding. Ausubel's theory of meaningful learning provided the theoretical framework and phenomenography the method of analysis. The semi-structured interview with…

The idea of what it means to understand mathematics has changed throughout history. Throughout, the function concept has remained a central theme. A conceptual understanding of function includes connections among multiple representations: (1) graphical; (2) verbal; (3) numerical; and (4) analytical. The idea of a function as a rule that describes…

Interpretation of correlation is often based on rules of thumb in which some boundary values are given to help decide whether correlation is non-important, weak, strong or very strong. This article shows that such rules of thumb may do more harm than good, and instead of supporting interpretation of correlation--which is their aim--they teach a…

The purpose of this study was to investigate primary school educators' health status, knowledge, perceptions and behaviour regarding nutrition and physical activity. Thus, nutrition and physical activity knowledge, attitudes, behaviour and risk factors for the development of non-communicable diseases of 155 educators were assessed in a…

This is a research study conducted on 17 teachers who teach English in Saudi international schools. It mainly aims at exploring teaching practices in these schools in terms of the principles of communicative language teaching (CLT). It also investigates the appropriateness of CLT in this context from the point of view of teachers. Two research…