There is on-going international interest in the relationships between assessment instruments, students' understanding of science concepts and context-based curriculum approaches. This study extends earlier research showing that students can develop connections between contexts and concepts--called "fluid transitions"--when studying…

This paper reports on a series of introductory programming workshops, initially targeting female high school students, which utilised Lego Mindstorms robots. Cognitive load theory (CLT) was applied to the instructional design of the workshops, and a controlled experiment was also conducted investigating aspects of the interface. Results indicated…

"Situational interest" is a short-term form of motivation which occurs when a specific situation stimulates the focused attention of students (e.g., a spectacular science demonstration could arouse transient interest amongst nearly all the students in a class, even those who are not normally interested in science). However, there have…

In this article, the authors report the results of two experiments that explored hypotheses about the relative learning advantages of role-play and scenario design. The experiments were conducted with similar student populations in Australia and Israel. Using a matched-pairs design, participants were randomly assigned to design and role-play…

This study investigates the ideas and beliefs of a small group of high school science teachers about student observations in the science classroom. Student views on science classroom observations have been previously reported on, but teachers and their students' ideas about observation is a very little researched area in science education. There…