Social issues provide real life and motivational questions which are successful in engaging the minds of many people (especially students). When dealing with social issues, students see the importance of so-called basic concepts and skills in dealing with them. For most persons, real mind engagement rarely occurs in educational settings. One…

The rapid development of science and technology has become a global issue in modern society, since it will not only bring conveniences into people's lives but it may also cause extensive environmental damage to the planet earth. Therefore, it is important to propagate the notion of Science Technology and Society (STS) and the awareness of…

Received conceptualizations of scientific literacy are grounded in (1) the notions of "knowledge", "concepts", and "skills" that science students have to "acquire", "appropriate", or "construct" or (2) the notion of "practices" to which they have to be "enculturated" so that they become part of a "community of practice". All such notions…

The paper presents a teaching regime and evaluation criteria for a general education course in biology. The purpose of the course is to provide students with biological information to help them understand problems facing humans and some of the social and ethical aspects of these problems. Using input from students concerning what constitutes a…

Formative computer-based assessments (CBAs) for self-instruction were introduced into a Year-2 field biology module. These CBAs were provided in "tutorial" mode where each question had context-related diagnostic feedback and tutorial pages, and a self-test mode where the same CBA returned only a score. The summative assessments remained…

Across the globe, it is no secret to people involved with career and technical education (CTE) that the German apprenticeship system is looked upon as the "gold standard" of workforce development training. In this article, the author compares the responses of subject matter experts (SMEs) in Germany and the United States, two of the…

These proceedings contain the papers and posters of the International Conferences on Internet Technologies & Society (ITS 2016), Educational Technologies (ICEduTech 2016) and Sustainability, Technology and Education (STE 2016), which have been organised by the International Association for Development of the Information Society and…

One often hears about the need to prepare American technical education students to compete in the burgeoning global manufacturing community. In addition, one hears experts say that learning certain programs and techniques can put the youth first in line for jobs where beating the offshore competition depends on production speed, product quality,…

Australia's innovation capacity is, in part, reliant on its teaching workforce--to teach and promote new technologies to industry. This pilot study examines how vocational education and training (VET) teachers, in particular TAFE (technical and further education) teachers, maintain the currency of their skills and knowledge base. It also explores…

Reformed preparation of science teachers is indeed vital for the vision of science teaching reform to be accomplished. Typically, a critical component of a preservice science teacher preparation program is the science teaching methods course. The usual intent of this course is to help preservice science students develop an understanding of various…

Strengthening the innovation system in the Netherlands is a priority for raising productivity growth, which has been relatively weak in recent years. Knowledge creation in the Netherlands is strong -- scientific publications per capita are the sixth highest in the OECD -- but innovation activity is only around the average for OECD countries…

The changes in the society related to the developments in science and technology underline the importance of the need for education. Technological developments broaden and accelerate communication, too. The opinion that rapid and unpreventable developments in technology today lead to many environmental problems and contribute to increases in…

The study examines Turkish pre-service elementary science teachers' scientific literacy levels. The research took place in Marmara University, in 2001-2002 academic year. The research participants were twenty randomly chosen students among all senior classes of the university mentioned above. The research data were gathered with the documents,…

In order to examine the implications of applying a teaching strategy that integrates a systems approach and project-based learning (PBL), it was implemented in two courses. The objective of the first course was to train preservice teachers to teach the subject of "Science and Technology to All" (mandatory subject in all of Israel's…

The main objective of this Working Paper is to show a set of indicators on the knowledge-based economy for China, mainly compiled from databases within EAS, although data from databases maintained by other parts of the OECD are included as well. These indicators are put in context by comparison with data for the United States, Japan and the EU (or…