Science/Technology/Society (STS) as a reform effort has been active in Iowa for three decades. A program called Iowa Chautauqua has evolved over the four decades to promote K-12 STS teaching in Iowa's 300 school districts. This is a study of how teachers have become Teacher Leaders of the reforms and lead other teachers who enroll as new…

Increasingly, mobile applications appear on the market that can support students in chemistry laboratory classes. In a multiple app-supported laboratory, each of these applications covers one use-case. In practice, this leads to situations in which information is scattered over different screens and written materials. Such a multiple app-supported…

The present study examines the effects of different study tasks on the acquisition of knowledge about acids and bases in a computer-based learning environment. Three different task formats were selected to create three treatment conditions: learning with gap-fill and matching tasks, learning with multiple-choice tasks, and learning only from text…

In late 2006, the New Zealand Government embarked on a series of initiatives to explore how the resources and expertise of eight, small, state-owned science research institutes could be combined efficiently to support science teaching in schools. Programmes were developed to enable students and teachers to access and become involved in local…

The purpose of this study was (a) to evaluate ten online periodic table sources for their accuracy and (b) to compare the types of information and links provided to users. Limited studies have been reported on online periodic table (Diener and Moore 2011; Slocum and Moore in "J Chem Educ" 86(10):1167, 2009). Chemistry students'…

The purpose of this study is to examine the manner in which the features of a constructivist learning environment, and the mechanisms at its base, are expressed in junior high school students' conceptions. Our research is based on an integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches, deigned to provide a wider ranging and deeper…

Students' attitudes and anxieties about science were measured by responses to two self-report questionnaires. The cohorts were Danish and American students at the upper secondary- and university-levels. Relationships between and among science attitudes, science anxiety, gender, and nationality were examined. Particular attention was paid to…

Augmented reality (AR) is currently considered as having potential for pedagogical applications. However, in science education, research regarding AR-aided learning is in its infancy. To understand how AR could help science learning, this review paper firstly has identified two major approaches of utilizing AR technology in science education,…

A troubleshooting activity was carried out by an e-tutor in two steps. First, students diagnosed a mistaken statement and then compared their diagnosis to a teacher's diagnosis provided by the e-tutor. The mistaken statement involved a widespread tendency to over-generalize Ohm's law. We studied the discourse between pairs of students…

The conception of Global Learning Communities (GLCs) was researched to discover potential benefits of the use of online technologies that facilitated communication and scientific data sharing outside of the normal classroom setting. 1,419 students in 635 student groups began the instructional unit. Students represented the classrooms of 33…

Since its origination in the late nineteenth century, the warfare metaphor has been used to characterize the relationship between science and religion, especially orthodox Christianity. Though thoroughly discredited by historians of science, the ideological descendants of Thomas Huxley, who spoke of science in quasi-religious terms, have kept the…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether undergraduate students receiving web-based instruction based on traditional, key character, or classification instruction differed in their performance of insect identification tasks. All groups showed a significant improvement in insect identifications on pre- and post-two-dimensional picture…

Concerns regarding students' learning and reasoning in chemistry classrooms are well documented. Students' reasoning in chemistry should be characterized by conscious consideration of chemical phenomenon from laboratory work at macroscopic, molecular/sub-micro and symbolic levels. Further, students should develop metacognition in relation to such…

In this study, a follow-up analysis of the data reported in Lin et al. ("Learn Media Technol." doi: 10.1080/17439884.2011.629660 , 2011), we investigated the relationship between student use of a virtual field trip (VFT) system and the probability of students reporting wanting to visit the national park site upon which the VFT was modeled,…

For students who major in meteorology, engaging in weather forecasting can motivate learning, develop critical-thinking skills, improve their written communication, and yield better forecasts. Whether such advances apply to students who are not meteorology majors has been less demonstrated. To test this idea, a weather discussion and an eLearning…