Investigates whether and how peer collaboration facilitated students' problem solving in physics. Finds that students' success was due to how they interacted and whether and how they invoked the relevant physics principles. (Author/CCM)

Examines the contents of textbooks used in physics courses between 1967 and 1997 in Victoria, Australia for curriculum balance and emphasis on different aspects of scientific literacy. (Author/CCM)

Investigates the views of 10 university chemistry lecturers, 85 pre-service chemistry teachers, and 23 chemistry students on the particulate level of a chemical reaction. (Author/CCM)

Describes the activities of two prominent science educators who presided over Australian science curriculum reforms during the 1960s and 1970s. Represents the educators' actions as heroic and describe how the Heroes shaped, modified, and united the culture through referents, rituals, and artifacts. Speculates on the importance of heroic activity…

Describes one teacher's first attempt to understand the role of students' self-evaluations of their process and products in a science unit centered upon open-ended projects. Describes the social structure in student group self-evaluation, and explains the important role students' self-evaluations can play as part of an open-ended project learning…

Presents an investigation into associations between students' (n=3215) perceptions of their interactions with teachers, the cultural background of students, and their attitudinal and cognitive achievement outcomes. Finds that students' attitude scores were higher in classrooms in which students perceived greater leadership, helping/friendly, and…

Applies the depth of cognitive processing construct to a social constructivist analysis of students' collaborative knowledge-building in science. Discusses the interplay of depth of sociocognitive processing with motivational, cognitive, and discursive elements of groups' interactions and the relationship between accuracy of ideas and depth of…

Finds that collaborative group work among pre-service elementary teachers stimulated increased levels of discussion and fostered deeper conceptual understanding than did traditional instructional methods. Discusses implications for science education in Fiji and similar places. (Contains 37 references.) (Author/WRM)

Explores the issues and concerns identified by a small group of teachers implementing technology using the document "A Statement of Technology for Australian Schools". Reviews four key questions posed by the teachers and argues that teachers' questions about their own beliefs and practices should drive professional development in technology…

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)

Describes three physics-related structured discussion tasks developed in cooperation with high school physics teachers. Presents the reactions of teachers and students to classroom use of the tasks. (Contains 23 references.) (Author/WRM)

Introduces a special issue that focuses on teachers and other practitioners undertaking research on their professional praxis. Discusses some experiences as a teacher-researcher, outlines the studies presented in the special issue, and considers questions of voice in the presentation of teacher-researcher studies. Contains 25 references. (WRM)

Examines the difficulties of engaging students who lack motivation to learn and attend sporadically in an urban high school science class. Contains 17 references. (Author/WRM)

Examines the extent and nature of Year 10 students' model-based reasoning in a laboratory investigation that considered the influence of six factors on electrical resistance. Finds that spontaneous use of the electron-drift model of metals in explanations increased over the duration of the task, but the explanations were restricted to mainly…

Describes an investigation into the accuracy of high school science students' confidence in their answers on classroom tests, how that accuracy varied between different types of questions, and whether having to judge their confidence in test items resulted in an improvement in accuracy over the school year. Contains 33 references. (Author/WRM)