This paper reports the experiences of teachers involved in a novel retraining scheme designed to meet a short-term crisis in numbers of teachers of physics. Teachers trained in other subject areas underwent an intensive six-month training in physics and were then placed in schools. During the first year of teaching some support for ongoing…

The theory of conceptual change is criticized because it focuses only on supposed underlying logical structures and rational process processes, and lacks attention to affective aspects as well as motivational constructs in students' learning science. This is a vast underestimation of the complexity and diversity of one's change of conceptions. The…

This paper reports on degrees of awareness and use of specific metacognitive strategies by 16 students in a final-year high school biology class in New Zealand. The aims of the intervention were to broaden students' thinking about bioethical issues associated with cancer and to enhance students' use of metacognition. Cues and prompts were used in…

With the growing emphasis on the development of scientific inquiry skills, there is a strong need for more research on students' ability to collect and interpret evidence. This paper calls attention to the notion of evidentiary competence that refers to the concepts and reasoning skills involved in the collection, organization, and interpretation…

Lack of confidence towards science is a major factor in the avoidance of teaching science at elementary school. This paper reports the results of a survey that asked 28 pre-service elementary teachers what they believed contributed to their confidence towards science and the teaching of science during a second year science unit where an holistic…

"School Innovation in Science" represents a model, developed through working with more than 200 Victorian schools, to improve science teaching and learning. SIS works at the level of the science team and the teacher, providing resources to challenge and support the change process. Its emphasis is on strategic planning supported by a framework for…

As teachers' knowledge determines to a large extent how they respond to educational innovation, it is necessary for innovators to take this knowledge into account when implementing educational changes. This study aimed at identifying patterns in the content and the structure of science teachers' knowledge, at a point in time when they still had…

This article employs the concept of community to interpret teacher professional learning in the context of the school science department. Using the transcripts of staff meetings, lesson observations and the conversations of school administrators, the departmental community is examined in terms of three metaphors: subject, relationships and…

In the past several years a number of authors have suggested that science education could benefit from insights gained by research in the social studies of science that documents and theorises science as it is actually done. There currently exist two gaps in the literature. First, most research in science studies are concerned with the practices…

Little research has been conducted on how students work when they are required to plan, build and evaluate artefacts in technology rich learning environments such as those supported by tools including flow charts, "Labview" programming and Lego construction. In this study, activity theory was used as an analytic tool to examine the social…

This study draws on recent research on the central role of representation in learning. While there has been considerable research on students' understanding of evaporation, the representational issues entailed in this understanding have not been investigated in depth. The study explored students' engagement with evaporation phenomena through…

Concepts learned in the classroom were reinforced and augmented by presenting them in a different context using cryogenics-based enrichment programmes (CBEPs) held in an out-of-school setting. The effectiveness of two CBEPs, which involve the use of liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen, was explored. Using a sample of 265 upper primary students, it…

With increasing numbers of students learning science through a second language in many school contexts, there is a need for research to focus on the impact language has on students' understanding of science concepts. Like other countries, Brunei has adopted a bilingual system of education that incorporates two languages in imparting its…

The aim of this study was to compare the achievement of prospective primary science teachers in a problem-based curriculum with those in a conventional primary science teacher preparation program with regard to success in learning about gases and developing positive attitudes towards chemistry. The subjects of the study were 101 first year…

A CD-ROM consisting of videos of two lessons by different teachers demonstrating exemplary science teaching was used to elicit, develop and track the changing conceptions of good science teaching of student teachers enrolled for the one-year Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) at several stages during the programme. It was found that the…