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…

This paper reports on research investigating six middle school teachers without engineering degrees as they taught an engineering unit on the engineering design process. Videotaped classroom sessions and teacher interviews were analyzed to understand the subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge the teachers used and developed as they…

We review articles published between 1995 and 2008 in four journals that are the primary scholarly resources for Technology Education middle school teaching. This descriptive study identified four main issues that scholars addressed: what should be taught in middle school, the structure and content of curriculum transformation, integrating…

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…

Several studies conducted by the European Union (e.g., Eurostat 2004, Implementation of "education & training 2010" work programme) demonstrate that women and girls are consistently significantly underrepresented in technological education, areas, and jobs. This is highlighted in the Joint Interim Report "Education and Training 2010" by the…

The paper reports on the trials of a Design and Technology (D&T) unit carried out in three different Indian contexts with a focus on collaborative learning. Both collaboration and technology education are not common to the Indian school system. As part of a larger project to introduce technology education, suitable for middle school girls and boys…

The focus of this paper is students' design productions as they engaged in designing and making a windmill model to lift a given weight. This work is part of a project on the development of design and technology (D&T) education units and its trials among Indian middle school students (Grade 6, age 11-14 years) in different socio-cultural settings.…