The objective of our program is to foster and facilitate authentic research experiences in middle and high school science courses. We do so by providing students with a complete experience in scientific experimentation and communication. The centerpiece is a set of experiment modules in which students investigate the effects of toxic chemicals on…

Helping students develop informed views about scientific inquiry (SI) has been and continues to be a goal of K-12 science education, as evidenced in various reform documents. Nevertheless, research focusing on understandings of SI has taken a perceptible backseat to that which focuses on the "doing" of inquiry. We contend that this is…

In response to the scientific evidence documenting both profound developmental changes in sleep and circadian biology during adolescence and the myriad of negative health, performance, and safety outcomes risks associated with chronic sleep loss, at least 70 public school districts in the United States, representing approximately 1,000 schools,…

Twenty-six states voluntarily partnered to provide leadership and guidance for the purpose of adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). However, a need exists to examine the NGSS versus state standards to better understand changes in curriculum and instruction to make their implementation successful for all states. The present…

This report describes how teachers support ninth-grade students who are doing scientific investigations in Natural Sciences in South African schools. This is of interest as allowing students to participate in inquiry-based investigations is a significant shift from traditional practices. It presents a new challenge to teachers as it signals an…

This article is the author's Distinguished Lecture presented at the 2010 Annual Conference of the American Association for Agricultural Education (AAAE), in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 25, 2010. In this lecture, the author looks back at the significant changes in agricultural education in the last 100 or so years and discusses four major ways that one…

This article explores the way in which different concepts of education are expressed through architecture. It analyses the case of the transformation of the campus of the "Colina de los Chopos" in Madrid after the Spanish Civil War. The victor's vision for education was captured physically in a new space that expressed the opposite…

"Science for All" is a mantra that has guided science education reform and practice for the past 20 years or so. Unfortunately, after 20 years of "Science for All" guided policy, research, professional development, and curricula African Americans continue to participate in the scientific enterprise in numbers that are staggeringly low. What is…

This paper provides a detailed description and evaluation of a three-year professional development project in a large urban setting in the southwestern United States. The impetus for the project was curriculum development focused on integrated scientific inquiry. Project goals included the development of a professional learning community, reformed…

In this paper we will demonstrate how powerful "Bildung" is as a tool in modern university teaching. The concept of "Bildung" was originally introduced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (Kant 1787, 1798, 1804) and the Prussian lawyer and politician Wilhelm von Humboldt (Humboldt 1792, Bohlin 2008). From 1810…

In the history of mankind three important philosophical and scientific revolutions have taken place. The first of these revolutions was the mathematical-axiomatic revolution in ancient Greece, when the philosophers from Thales of Miletus to Archimedes built up the abstract deductive method used in pure mathematics. The second took place in the…

Global warming and climate change have become hot topics that incite debate, inspire scientific research, and influence international policy. However, the scientific research that provides the past climate and environmental information upon which contemporary environmental change is measured, receives little attention in high school curriculum.…

One of the recommendations of the concerns about the reforms in science and technology education is the "Science and Technology for All" program. This program is aimed at high school students and this module is to be taught in high schools considering that brain research is an interdisciplinary topic and represents the frontiers of current…

This book explores the challenges of implementing and assessing educational interventions in varied classroom contexts. Included are reflections on the challenges of designing studies for improving the instructional core of schools, guidelines for establishing evidence of interventions' impacts across a wide range of settings, and an assessment of…

Drawing on sociological and philosophical studies of science, science educators have begun to view argumentation as a central scientific practice that students should learn. In this article, we extend recent work to understand the structure of students' arguments to include judgments about their quality through content analyses of high school…