This paper describes one way in which students develop durable, classroom-specific identities. When students enter new groups their identities are often fluid. Over time, however, students and teachers generally come to identify individuals in predictable ways. Durable identities emerge across events, as signs of identity come to presuppose a…

The purpose of the study was to assess the level of gender awareness of science teachers in Zimbabwe's two education districts. A semi-closed questionnaire was administered to a sample of 100 science teachers. The questionnaire assessed teachers' gender awareness based on content, teaching methods, classroom dynamics and their general perception…

How teachers view the nature of scientific knowledge is crucial to their understanding of science content and how it can be taught. This book presents an overview of the dynamics of scientific progress and its relationship to the history and philosophy of science, and then explores their methodological and educational implications and develops…

The controversial concept of evolution makes up only a small part of the science curriculum stated in Arkansas. During the past few years, the curriculum topic of "Intelligent Design" has caught the attention of many science teachers in the public schools. The Intelligent Design Movement has been successful in attracting the attention of…

The discovery of DNA is a classic example of the importance of working across content areas. Conceptually, interdisciplinarity can be fuzzy. Thankfully, scholars like Allen Repko and Julie Thompson Klein offer definitions one can build on. Klein (1990) sees interdisciplinarity as a bridge that links different disciplines while restructuring and…

An identification of students' interests in biology can help teachers better engage their pupils and meet their needs. To this end, over 28,000 self-generated biological questions raised by students from kindergarten through graduate school were analyzed according to age and gender. The sample demonstrated a dominance of female contributions among…

Teachers' views are worth hearing in order to get ideas on how to address the trend of declining enrolment in physics at the university level, which is regarded as a global problem. This study explores physics teachers' views on how to encourage more students to study physics at the university level. A sample of 166 physics teachers in Singapore…

If we want our students to become capable practitioners of scientific inquiry, we should not stop at providing opportunities to do inquiry. We need to be intentional about assessing and teaching the competencies necessary for inquiry. However, the ability to conduct scientific inquiry can be difficult to assess. Therefore, the author created The…

Recent reports have begun to lay the foundation for a re-visioned K-8 science curriculum which includes four strands that could be used to define and assess science proficiency for all students. Using these strands as an analytic lens, this pre-post multiple-case case study explores elementary school science teachers' practices and their students'…

The national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education Initiative favors a curriculum shift from the compartmentalization of math and science classes into discrete subject areas to an integrated, multidisciplinary experience. Many states are currently implementing programs in high schools that provide greater integration of math,…

This study explored the impact of using a socioscientific issue (SSI) based curriculum on developing science content knowledge. Using a multi-level assessment design, student content knowledge gains were measured before and after implementation of a three-week unit on global warming (a prominent SSI) that explored both the relevant science content…

The increasingly interdisciplinary nature of today's scientific research is leading to the transformation of undergraduate education. In addressing these needs, the University of Houston's College of Technology has developed a new interdisciplinary research-based biotechnology laboratory curriculum. Using the pesticide degrading bacterium,…

This study presents findings from an analysis of the Turkish Science and Technology Curriculum Guidelines and their alignment to the university entrance examination. The analysis of the Science and Technology Curriculum focused on various related aspects: content areas and learning outcomes in terms of scientific process skills, science technology…

South African schools have been confronted with educational reform since the mid-nineties and the process is still continuing. The concomitant changes put a very high demand on physical sciences teachers and also have an impact on teacher behaviour. The purpose of this study was to probe whether teachers could be considered equipped to teach the…

I describe how Joe Kincheloe experienced learning from a peer during his pre-school life only to see how his friend was unable to succeed at school. Joe's commitment to empowered cognition was grounded first, by his friend, Larry's mentorship--teaching him the environmental nuances of the mountains in rural Tennessee, and secondly, the…