Few studies have focused on understanding how teaching and learning in classrooms are mediated by other dimensions of the organizational systems of which education is an integral part. Our 7-year ethnographic study of an urban high school shows how time and temporality constitute key practical and theoretical resources to the actors in the…

This paper reviews the significant sociocultural literatures on science studies, cultural diversity, and sustainability science to develop theoretical perspectives for science education more suitable to the challenges of contemporaneity. While the influences of science studies and cultural diversity are not uncommon within the science education…

The focus of this research was to understand how a program for women in science, mathematics, and engineering (SM&E) at college level in the southeastern United States functioned to influence women's decision making in terms of participation in these fields. By employing Lave and Wenger's theory of situated learning, we explored this program…

Reform efforts in science education emphasize the importance of rigorous treatment of science standards and use of innovative pedagogical approaches to make science more meaningful and successful. In this paper, we present a learning-goals-driven design model for developing curriculum materials, which combines national standards and a…

We investigated general chemistry students' intuitive ideas about the expected properties of the products of a chemical reaction. In particular, we analyzed college chemistry students' predictions about the color, smell, and taste of the products of chemical reactions represented at the molecular level. The study was designed to explore the extent…

Although misconceptions in science have been established in interview studies, their role during the learning process is poorly examined. In this paper, we use results from a classroom study to analyze to what extent nonscientific ideas in electrochemistry that students report in interviews enter into their learning in a more authentic setting. We…

We focus on the concept of matter and explore how young children in urban schools bridge their spontaneous concepts and everyday experiences with scientific concepts introduced to them by children's literature information books and their teacher. The study shows how material artifacts used in a sorting activity became ideational tools--semiotic…

Youth from low-income, minority backgrounds have often been marginalized from introductory courses, advanced study and careers in physics. Cultivating student agency may have the potential to improve access for diverse groups of learners. However, the implications of this lens for student learning have been minimally examined in the physics…

This longitudinal study explored change in teachers' knowledge of subjects they teach from preservice training through 17 years of professional experience. It followed secondary school science teachers in Australia, through sequences of individual interviews in which change in content knowledge (mainly energy-related) was probed primarily via…

Previous research has established a close link between students' conceptions of learning and approaches to learning. Until recently, only a few quantitative studies have investigated the relationship between high school students' conceptions of learning science and the approaches they adopt to learning science. This study sought to address this…

To explore the ways in which teacher-guided and student-centered instructional approaches influence students' conceptual understanding of seasonal change, we designed a technology-enhanced learning (TEL) course to compare, by means of concept maps, the learning outcome of students in two groups: a teacher-guided (TG) class (with whole-class…

Students studying in government-run schools in rural India possess much experiential knowledge of the world around them. This paper presents a narrative account of an ethnographic exploration of such students as they attempted to learn about electricity in an eighth-grade classroom in a government-run school in a village in India. The paper shows…

Curriculum analysis, modification, and enactment are core components of teacher practice. Beginning teachers rely heavily on curriculum materials that are often of poor quality to guide their practice. As a result, we argue that preservice teachers need to learn how to use curriculum materials for effective teaching. To address this concern, the…

Two disparate research programs have addressed the challenge of instructional multimedia design. One, based on cognitive load theory, has focused on ways of reducing unnecessary cognitive load during instruction to free up resources for learning. The other, based on constructivism, has centered on interactive multimedia, allowing students to build…

This investigation delineates a multi-year action research agenda designed to develop an instructional model for teaching the nature of science (NOS) to preservice science teachers. Our past research strongly supports the use of explicit reflective instructional methods, which includes Thomas Kuhn's notion of learning by ostention and treating…