Investigates the reasoning strategies of urban year-six students involved in creating their own questions and plans for scientific investigations. Focuses on how students generate ideas for their own investigations. Contains 24 references. (DDR)

A sample of Australian Year-12 students (n=16) who participated in the TIMSS testing were interviewed immediately after the test about their responses to test items. Students had trouble relating TIMSS questions to generalized aspects of everyday life and to school science topics. Students seemed to place little value on performing well on the…

Studies a teacher's role and actions in a science learning community. Interprets two teaching episodes that illustrate how the teacher helps a group of students transform their understanding of electrical circuits. Contains 26 references. (DDR)

Beneath elements of cognitive development, motivation is seen as a basic concept to describe students' learning in a physics classroom. German secondary school students regard physics as difficult to learn, very abstract, and dominated by males. Knowing about the influence of motivation on learning physics may lead to new insights in the design of…

Microanalyzes graph use in lectures drawn from artifacts compiled from videotaping all lectures and seminars in a 13-week ecology course. Focuses on both the text and the gesture-related references made in the reading of a graph in an ecology lecture. Contains 36 references. (DDR)

Tracks five-year-old children's ideas by a range of means during and subsequent to a classroom sequence on evaporation. Explores the relationship between social and individual perspectives on learning, and questions some assumptions underlying conceptual change research. Analyzes the children's explanations of various evaporation phenomena over…

Describes a quantitative study of secondary school teachers' beliefs about curriculum design. Uses the 33-item Science Curriculum Orientation Inventory (SCOI) to measure five distinct orientations to curriculum: academic, cognitive process, society-centered, humanistic, and technological. Collects data from 810 integrated science, chemistry,…

Finds that students taught with a constructivist approach had much more increased personal knowledge concerning energy compared to students taught in a traditional manner. (Contains 15 references.) (Author/WRM)

Reports on a pilot study which sought to find out what 4- to 8-year-old rural Australian Aboriginal children think about night and day. Findings indicate more variations in thinking than were found in earlier research. Raises questions about the framing of cross-cultural research and the realization of indigenous data. Contains 40 references.…

Presents a reflective account of a science teacher's endeavors to use the referent of critical constructivism to transform her pedagogical practices. The context of the action research is a Year 10 bioethics unit taught at an independent girls' school. Contains 44 references. (DDR)

Beliefs about science and religion held by students (n=44), teachers (n=10), and clergy (n=4) in a Lutheran secondary school in Australia were assessed via survey and interview. Participants' views of the relationship between science and religious beliefs were complex. Concludes that traditional science programs do not adequately address the range…

Differences in the status of ontological categories on the concept maps of secondary-, undergraduate- and graduate-level chemistry students were analyzed with the "Pathfinder" scaling algorithm and multidimensional scaling. Results indicate differences among groups in the structural significance of abstract process-related nodes and…

Explores the dynamics in the loci of commitment of several participants in a university-level biology course developed for elementary school teachers. Concentrates on two instructors with almost opposing loci of commitment. Contains 19 references. (DDR)

Critically analyzes the core ideas of chaos theory to determine whether they are worth teaching and explores the accessibility of these ideas for students. The studies are embedded in a Model of Educational Reconstruction which seeks to bring science content structure concerns and educational concerns into balance and interaction with one another.…

Describes a project in which discussions were held between agriculturalists and elementary teachers in order to provide an opportunity for the participants to examine the ways in which science is developed and used in an occupational context integral to the community. Examines the views of science and school science expressed by the participants.…