The instructor of an integrated science course for nonscience majors embedded content-related video segments from YouTube and other similar internet sources into lecture. Through this study, the instructor wanted to know students' perceptions of how video use engaged them and increased their interest and understanding of science. Written survey…

We respond to Hwang and Kim and Yeo's critiques of the conceptual continuity framework in science education. First, we address the criticism that their analysis fails to recognize the situated perspective of learning by denying the dichotomy of the formal and informal knowledge as a starting point in the learning process. Second, we address the…

What does it mean to understand science? This commentary extends Brown and Kloser's argument on the role of native language for science learning by exploring the meaning of understanding in school science and discusses the extent that science educators could tolerate adulterated forms of scientific knowledge. Taking the perspective of social…

Connected Chemistry (named CC1 to denote Connected Chemistry Chapter 1) is a computer-based environment for learning the topics of gas laws and kinetic molecular theory in chemistry. It views chemistry from an "emergent" perspective, how macroscopic phenomena result from the interaction of many submicroscopic particles. Connected Chemistry employs…

The purpose of this study was to investigate Grade 10 Thai students about their understanding on inter- and intramolecular forces. Sixty four students were elicited by administered open-ended questions after finishing normal instruction on chemical bonding topics. The instrument was in a set of open-ended questions which contained a number of…

Existing studies on single-sex schooling suffer from biases due to student selection to schools and single-sex schools being better in unmeasured ways. In Trinidad and Tobago students are assigned to secondary schools based on an algorithm allowing one to address self-selection bias and cleanly estimate an upper-bound single-sex school effect. The…

Two separate writing-to-learn activities in which students wrote to authentic audiences outside of the instructor were used in a college integrated science course, Science of Water. For the first task, students were asked to write to fourth-grade students, and for the second, students were asked to write to their academic advisor. An overview of…

The past 20 years or so have seen ongoing concern for the nature of science education in the Anglophone developed world. A particular focus of this concern has been the need to find new ways to frame science curricula that will engage students, yet it is proving difficult to achieve this goal. In this article I argue that the impact on science…

Working with evidence is a fundamental part of scientific enquiry. Children should be taught to consider evidence and evaluate it. They should make simple comparisons, comparing what happened with what they expected to happen, and try to explain what happened through drawing on their knowledge and understanding. In this article, the author…

How to engage culturally and linguistically diverse students in learning science is a relatively new field of study. Researchers have begun to address this question using a range of theoretical perspectives, including: (a) a cognitively based perspective, (b) a cross-cultural perspective, and (c) a sociopolitical perspective. Although proponents…

Research focusing on community college leadership programs and the needs of workforce development personnel shows that the primary knowledge and skills needed by professionals in the field include collaboration, teaching, community college context, effects of globalization, data usage, and skills related to leadership and team work. Program…

As a means of achieving scientific literacy goals in society, the last two decades have witnessed international science curriculum redevelopment that increasingly advocates a "new look" inquiry-based approach to learning. This paper reports on the nature of the student-experienced curriculum where secondary school students are learning…

In this study we investigate how 5-year-old children in Brazil and their teachers collectively design science curriculum. More specifically, we develop an agency|structure dialectic as a framework to describe this collective praxis in which science curriculum may emerge as the result of children-teacher transactions rather than as a result of…

The authors created an interactive reflective log (IRL) to provide teachers with an opportunity to use a journal approach to record, evaluate, and communicate student understanding of science concepts. Unlike a traditional journal, the IRL incorporates prompts to encourage students to discuss their understanding of science content and science…

Science education depends on literacy. But adding reading to a curriculum that is already packed with content, experiments, and activities can be tough. So how can a teacher accomplish this, while ensuring that students have multiple opportunities for valuable inquiry learning? This Idea Bank provides three strategies for integrating reading into…