The teleological bias, a major learning obstacle, involves explaining biological phenomena in terms of purposes and goals. To probe the teleological bias, researchers have used acceptance judgement tasks and preference judgement tasks. In the present study, such tasks were used with German high school students (N = 353) for 10 phenomena from human…

This study uses boundary crossing in activity theory as one normative framework for opening a deliberative inquiry in new discursive spaces to elicit "gender awareness" in teachers' practices. We illustrate this framework by drawing from data in one European teacher education project. Seven case studies were conducted and data were…

This study investigates how well prepared student teachers are to implement species identification in school. Data were collected with the help of a questionnaire and a PowerPoint presentation in which local plant and animal species were presented. Participants (n = 357) correctly identified, on average, 23% of the plants and 44% of the animals.…

Media education forms part of the National Minimum Curriculum of England, Malta and Germany. Teacher training courses differ greatly in how teachers are prepared to teach media education. In this paper we shall investigate the attitudes of a sample of teachers trained in England, Malta and in Germany towards their perceived importance of media…

The transition from living at home to living independently has been characterised as a time of stress, and there is evidence to suggest that this transition from youth to young adulthood influences food choice. The current study explores this phenomenon and compares 18-24-year-old university students' motivation for food choice in Australia and…

Six experiments examined whether novelty versus familiarity influences global versus local processing styles. Novelty and familiarity were manipulated by either framing a task as new versus familiar or by asking participants to reflect upon novel versus familiar events prior to the task (i.e., procedural priming). In Experiments 1-3, global…