Simple matching models of decision making are no longer sufficient as a basis for career counselling and education. The challenge for contemporary careers advisers is how to communicate some of the complexities of modern career development to their students; in particular, the apparently contradictory relationship between the need for planning and…

This study investigates the effect of computer animation on assessment and the conditions under which animation may improve or hinder assessment of conceptual understanding in physics. An instrument was developed by replacing static pictures and descriptions of motion with computer animations on the Force Concept Inventory, a commonly used pencil…

We report on the development of students' ideas of probability and probability density in a University of Maine laboratory-based general education physics course called "Intuitive Quantum Physics". Students in the course are generally math phobic with unfavorable expectations about the nature of physics and their ability to do it. We…

Physicists and physics students have been studied with respect to the variation in the ways they expound on their topic of research and a physics problem, respectively. A phenomenographic approach has been employed; six fourth-year physics students and 10 teacher-researcher physicists at various stages of their careers have been interviewed. Four…

Children and teachers may not think in the same way about particular science concepts. Such parallel lines of thought can compound children's confusion and misunderstanding as they learn science at primary school. The situation could be more acute when student teachers are teaching science, because of their limited experience of considering…

As a science teacher, the author strives to make science an effective component of a liberal arts education. In this article, he describes a conceptual physics/astronomy course integrated with such humanities fields as history, art, and literature, which he has been teaching over the last 5 years. The course, entitled Physics of Heaven and…

To what extent can a large-scale national teacher-enhancement project help science teachers employ new pedagogical methods in the science classroom? In this study, data from 13 high school physics teachers who taught 23 classes with 401 students were examined to determine the extent to which a teacher-enhancement project can alter teachers'…

We report the results of a study on students' interest in physics at the end of their compulsory schooling in Israel carried out in the framework of the ROSE Project. Factors studied were their opinions about science classes, their out-of-school experiences in physics, and their attitudes toward science and technology. Students' overall interest…

The research issue in this study is how to structure collaborative learning so that it improves solving physics problems more than individual learning. Structured collaborative learning has been compared with individual learning environments with Schoenfeld's problem-solving episodes. Students took a pre-test and a post-test and had the…

In this article I build on the review of research by Black and Wiliam which provided extensive evidence of the role of assessment for learning for raising standards in pupils' attainment. The purpose of the present empirical study was to explore the extent to which science teachers use assessment for learning practices when they teach physics…

Preservice elementary teachers in a conceptual physics course were given multiple resources to use during several inquiry activities in order to investigate how materials were chosen, used, and valued. These students performed significantly better on assessment items related to the inquiry physics activities than on items related to traditional…

The purpose of the study was to determine the typical teaching methods used in upper secondary physics in Finland and Norway and how students would like to study physics. Moreover, the further aim of seeing how certain background variables may explain students' desire to study their chosen specialist subject, physics or social science…

Success of high school students in solving physics questions of student selection examination (OSS) that has to be taken by high school students before entering the Turkish universities have been investigated with regard to these questions to be solved by students and suitability to high school physics curriculum and factors affecting students…

The attrition of females studying physics after high school is a growing concern to the science education community. Most undergraduate science programs require introductory physics coursework. Thus, success in introductory physics is usually necessary for students to progress to higher levels of science study. Success also influences attitudes;…

The 2012 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education was designed to provide up-to-date information and to identify trends in the areas of teacher background and experience, curriculum and instruction, and the availability and use of instructional resources. A total of 7,752 science and mathematics teachers in schools across the United…