Previous studies have pointed to the benefits of involving students' everyday life experiences in lessons and in contextualizing the science content to enhance learning and positive attitudes toward school science. However, most of these investigations have been conducted as intervention studies. By contrast, the present study explored how…

Radiation is ever-present around us, yet there is still a lack of knowledge about radiation among the general population, especially when it comes to students. For this study, we measured the effectiveness of a lesson plan on radiation concepts that focused on ionising radiation and was supported by references and examples from the superhero…

Australia's involvement in World War I, currently in its centenary years of commemoration, continues to capture the public's imagination in a way that arguably surpasses all other historical events in Australia's history. This is particularly in terms of popular culture representations such as advertising, film, and television; children's…

The English language day by day is becoming ever increasingly important in the world. Music in foreign language education can be seen as a helpful method that spontaneously livens the learning atmosphere. In this paper, we are arguing for (the use of) songs that stir and inspire "social change" and that are an "authentic" part…

This empirical study investigates Chinese students' popular music preferences in daily life and to what extent and in what ways they prefer learning popular music in school in Shanghai, China. Data were drawn from questionnaires completed by 1,730 secondary students (aged 12-17) and interviews with 60 students from 10 secondary schools, between…

This article argues that theoretical understandings of multimodality have enormous potential for assessment purposes in secondary school contexts. Informed by the work of three researchers in three North American high schools, the article offers vignettes of the effective assessment of communicative competence in English classrooms that draws on…

While Shulman argues that an important component of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is teachers' understanding of the alternative conceptions commonly held by students, relatively little is known about what students believe about many topics in the school curriculum. This paper focuses on a content area typically featured in Geography…

This is a pioneer study of Macau's music education focusing on music listening preference. Adopting models from Western cultures, the study, launched in 2006, aimed to explore the factors of age and gender in regard to music preference. The subjects ranged from fourth-graders to university students (N=2495) (15 missing). Participants rated their…