This study describes how student unit assessment data helped support ongoing curriculum revisions in the Baltimore City School District. This project is situated in the STEM Achievement in Baltimore Elementary Schools (SABES) project, which is a National Science Foundation funded multi-year Math Science Partnership between the Johns Hopkins…

This paper describes outcomes of a series of teacher professional development grants that put teachers in the driver's seat of their own professional learning. Teachers used grant funds to build a team, select a focus for their teams' professional growth, and take actions that they felt would be most effective in helping them improve their…

Science teaching and learning in the United States are at a pivotal point. "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" (NRC 2012b) and the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS"; NGSS Lead States 2013) shift science educators' focus from simply teaching science ideas to helping students figure out phenomena and…

An important objective in science education is the acquisition of science process skills (SPS) by the students. Therefore, science coursebooks, among the main resources of elementary science curricula, are to convey accurate SPS. This study is a qualitative study based on the content analysis of the science coursebooks used at middle schools. In…

The purpose of this article was to present an overview of pre-service science teacher preparation in China, which is heavily influenced by Chinese tradition, Confucianism, and rapid social and economic development. The policies, science teacher education systems and related programs jointly contribute to producing enough science teachers for…

Modern research often requires collaboration of experts in fields, such as math, chemistry, biology, physics, and computer science to develop unique solutions to common problems. Traditional introductory undergraduate laboratory curricula in the sciences often do not emphasize connections possible between the various disciplines. We designed an…

Currently science education is understood not only as education in mathematics, physics and chemistry, but also as an education in informatics. To analyze the current state of informatics education within the tertiary economy and managerial study fields was the aim of the research, the purpose of which was to support curricula innovation in the…

Collaboration and synergy among education stakeholders is a fundamental pillar for any educational reform success. The reported research analyses the state of collaboration and work dynamics that existed between natural science district officials and primary school teachers in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Data were collected through…

Background and purpose: To date, there has been little research on the Teacher Professional Development (TPD) for delivering a mobile technology-supported science curriculum. To address this, a TPD model for a science curriculum supported by mobile technology was developed and evaluated in this paper. The study reported focuses on the…

Purpose of this research is to examine effect of science teaching enriched with technological practices on attitude levels of secondary school 7th grade students towards science course. Execution step of the research was performed on 7th grade students attending to a government secondary school in Turkey in the academic year of 2015 and completed…

Grant-funded curriculum development efforts can substantially impact practice and research in science education. Therefore, understanding the sometimes-unintended consequences of changes in grant priorities is crucial. Using the case of two large funding agencies in the United States, the current portfolio review provides insight into these…

A "Framework for K-12 Science Education" (NRC 2012) and subsequent "Next Generation Science Standards" (Achieve Inc. 2013) will substantially influence the teaching and learning of science in the United States. The "Framework," for example, calls for students to learn about several practices related to scientific…

The ongoing battle to insert intelligent causes into the science classrooms has been met with political approval and scientific rejection. Administrators in the United States need to be aware of the law related to creationism and intelligent design in order to lead in local curricular battles. Although unlikely to appease the ID proponents, there…

Charles Darwin supposed that evolution involved a process of gradual change, generated randomly, with the selection and retention over many generations of survival-promoting features. Some theists have never accepted this idea. "Intelligent design" is a relatively recent theory, supposedly based on scientific evidence, which attempts to…

This article focuses on the philosophy of creativity and its enhancement through an undergraduate research experience. In this paper we offer suggestions for infusing the undergraduate mathematics and science curriculum with research experiences as a way of fostering creativity in our students. We refer to the term "research" broadly,…