In 2009 the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture assigned the National Board of Education with the task of carrying out a nationwide evaluation of all seven cross-curricular themes. The evaluation is one of the largest education evaluation projects the National Board of Finland has ever organised. The present authors were invited to evaluate…

This article discusses pupils' readiness for self-regulation in Exploratory Production in Technology Education. In the forethought phase of Exploratory Production, pupils envision and regulate their technological production activities. Next, in the performance phase, the envisioned goals are tried and implemented through ideating, planning…

This case study examined team-based computer-game design efforts by children with diverse abilities to explore the nature of their collective design actions and cognitive processes. Ten teams of middle-school children, with a high percentage of minority students, participated in a 6-weeks, computer-assisted math-game-design program. Essential…

This paper considers an approach to studying issues in technology and science, which integrates design and inquiry activities towards creating and exploring technological models of scientific phenomena. We implemented this approach in a context where the learner inquires into a biological phenomenon and develops its representation in the form of a…

The present study investigates awareness, factual knowledge, opinions, and risk perceptions of students from Turkish middle schools with regard to nanotechnology in a very general sense. The study was carried out among 1,396 middle school 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students. The students' perceptions of and opinions about nanotechnology were…

The purposes of this study were to develop and verify a model that contributes to our understanding of the attitudes toward technology held by students in junior high school, as well as to explore relationships among the factors in this model. We distributed questionnaires to research participants selected on the basis of stratified random…

This study aims to investigate the differences between male and female students in technology project design. The major gender differences discussed in this study include the problem discovering and solving abilities, maneuverability, and inquiry attitude among middle grade students. In the project design, students were required to design and…

Assessing technological literacy in the USA will require a large expenditure of resources. While these important initiatives are taking place, it is useful to analyze existing archival data to get a sense of students' understanding of technology. Such archival data exists from the entries submitted to the Toshiba/NSTA ExploraVisions competition…

This paper presents a study about learning and the problem solving process identified among junior high school pupils participating in robotics projects in the Lego Mindstorm environment. The research was guided by the following questions: (1) How do pupils come up with inventive solutions to problems in the context of robotics activities? (2)…

The purpose of this study was to examine the structure of students' knowledge formed in information education at junior high-school level. Seventy-two 7th graders (first-year junior high-school students) and 78 10th graders (first-year high-school students) participated in the study. A cluster analysis was performed on 40 items of knowledge that…