This study examined classrooms in three, high performing, public secondary schools serving high need communities. Of 22 classes observed, we found approximately one third exhibited an instructional demand for 21st century skills. In many of the remaining classes, teachers appeared to apply misconceptions of 21st century skills, and unintentionally…

The present study elaborates on a domain-specific approach to NOS (Nature Of Science) and employs a NOTSs (Nature Of The Sciences) agenda to investigate how Greek in-service physics teachers understand the unique features of school physics and biology. Our theoretical framework focuses on the notion of worldview and important differences that…

This study aims to assess learning outcomes and identify students' misconceptions in plant classification. We conducted a questionnaire survey with undergraduate and master's students. The qualitative analysis of the students' responses made it possible to shed light on the difficulties of assimilation of many notions and also to identify the…

The federal Race to the Top competition provided significant impetus for states to adopt value-added models as a part of their teacher evaluation systems. Such models typically link students to their teachers in the spring semester when statewide tests are administered and estimate a teacher's performance based on his or her students' learning…

The paper is framed within a broader research programme aimed at investigating how science education can enhance the formation of what we call future-scaffolding skills: the abilities to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one's eye on the horizon. To this end, we designed a module (targeted at…

Instructional technology in the secondary education classroom changed the way that students learn in the classroom and how teachers deliever instruction. The phenomenological study on debunked the myths of perceived barriers by teachers in the secondary education classroom. The myths regarding instructional technology were the reluctance of…

This research deals with students' abilities to read chemistry textbook images about dispersed systems. Secondary school students were included as the research participants, and their abilities to propose the titles of the realistic, conventional, and hybrid textbook images about dispersed systems, were analyzed. Additionally, their written…

Determination of the relationship between individuals' cognitive styles and cognitive structure outcomes was the main aim of this study. Sixty-six participants were enrolled in the study and their cognitive styles were determined by using the Hidden Figure Test (for their field dependent/independent dimension of cognitive style) and the…

Background: Conceptual change is a process in which an individual's understanding and the basis of this understanding change over time. Vosniadou's framework theory explains conceptual change in terms of how students learn to relate the observable and unobservable in everyday phenomena. As a result, courses that relate physical phenomena to…

This study compared how adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) evaluated unfamiliar peers (i.e., perceptions), as well as how adolescents believed they were evaluated by peers (i.e., metaperceptions). The Perceptions and Metaperceptions Questionnaire was designed to quantify perceptions and metaperceptions following a live…

This article examines and offers insights to a year of Socratic circles in the context of a world history classroom. Grounding this practice in relevant research before offering examples from the classroom and providing advice to practitioners, this discussion strategy offers an antidote to the often divisive and destructive examples of…

This article has two main goals. The first is to summarize and comment on the current state of affairs of generative approaches to SLA (GenSLA), 35 years into its history. This discussion brings the readership of SSLA up to date on the questions driving GenSLA agendas and clears up misconceptions about what GenSLA does and does not endeavor to…

Informal chemistry education/chemistry outreach is ubiquitous with the chemical enterprise. However, little research has focused on the planning, implementation, or evaluation of these events. Results from a previous study suggest that college students involved with collegiate chapters of the American Chemical Society and Alpha Chi Sigma are…

People are inundated with visual information. In this study, I address the question: "When preservice elementary teacher candidates include visuals and graphics into social studies lessons, in what ways do they integrate these materials?" As part of a social studies methods course, participants created lesson plans. These plans included…

The purpose of this study is to examine the process of conceptual change in which the heat concept has gone through in time and provide an analytical assessment. To this end, problem-based learning groups were formed with 13 sophomore university students. One of these students was selected and interviewed. The interviews were examined using the…