Many preservice primary teachers initially have a low self-efficacy, or belief in their ability to teach science, but well-designed science education courses can produce significant positive changes in efficacy beliefs. However, the extent to which the belief changes are durable, or maintained over time, is yet to be established. The purpose of…

This study reports on a multi-year effort to create and evaluate cognitive-based curricular materials for secondary school science classrooms. A team of secondary teachers, educational researchers, and academic biomedical engineers developed a series of curriculum units that are based in biomedical engineering for secondary level students in…

The paper is an extended work from a previous study on Taiwanese and German students' conceptions of the universe (Liu, 2005). The study revealed that students discuss astronomical events and entities based on a mental model of universe and their models of the universe seem to have similar underlying principles with historical ones. In present…

Two of the challenges in teaching Food Analysis are bringing relevance to the various chemical and physical analyses discussed and exposing students to the realities of quality assurance in the food industry. In a project to help meet those objectives, each student, with the assistance of a "resource person" from the food industry, completes the…

The National Science Education Standards recognize that inquiry-based instruction holds significant promise for developing scientifically literate students. The Science Teacher Inquiry Rubric (STIR) was developed based upon the National Science Education Standards' essential features of inquiry instruction (NRC, 2000). A pilot study using a…

This study aimed to facilitate students' entrance to an introductory cell biology course for biology majors. The most prominent difficulty in this introductory course, is students' poor background-knowledge, such as a lack of understanding of very basic concepts and terms, and the huge differences in students' background knowledge. In order to…

This paper presents the course of action and outcome of a teacher-based action research project concerning development and evaluation of an online introductory biology course for non-majors. The research took place in a small community college and compared online and traditional instructional formats. A course was developed in an entirely…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the 9th-grade students' understandings of the nature of scientific knowledge. The study also aimed to investigate the differences in students' understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge by gender, and school types. A total of 575 ninth grade students from four different school types (General…

Student success in solving physics problems is related to the representational format of the problem. We study student representational competence in two large-lecture algebra-based introductory university physics courses with approximately 600 participants total. We examined student performance on homework problems given in four different…

Physics education research increasingly makes use of video data for analysis of student learning and teaching practice. Collection of these data is conceptually simple but execution is often fraught with costly and time-consuming complications. This pragmatic paper discusses the development of systems to record and permanently archive audio and…

In a recent study we showed that physics students' problem-solving performance can depend strongly on problem representation, and that giving students a choice of problem representation can have a significant impact on their performance [ P. B. Kohl and N. D. Finklestein, Phys. Rev. ST. Phys. Educ. Res. 1, 010104 (2005) ] In this paper, we…

We developed, piloted, and evaluated a successful model for integrating other disciplinary perspectives while learning a specific discipline. Faculty who taught first-year biology and mathematics courses produced examples of how these disciplines complement each other. These faculty presented students with the connecting threads that integrate…

This article argues that an important source of the difficulties posed by particular concepts and theories is the narrow range of "types of causal models" with which most learners are familiar. Most learners are familiar with relatively simple styles of causal models, but many concepts and theories in science depend on styles…

As words fly onto the computer screen, revolve, and dissolve, image, sound, and movement enter school classrooms in "new" and significant ways, ways that reconfigure the relationship of image and word. In this paper I discuss these "new" modal configurations and explore how they impact on students' text production and reading…

One consequence of the advancing globalization and technological dependence of society is that people outside professional science are finding that issues of concern to them have a science dimension. I consider how school science education can support engagement with scientific information. I contend that teaching about the epistemology of science…