An Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is an effective method for evaluating competencies. However, scores obtained from an OSCE are vulnerable to many potential measurement errors that cases, items, or standardized patients (SPs) can introduce. Monitoring these sources of errors is an important quality control mechanism to ensure…

Background: Sexual history and HIV counseling (SHHIVC) are essential clinical skills. Our project's purpose was to evaluate a standardized patient educational intervention teaching third-year medical students SHHIVC. Methods: A four-hour standardized patient workshop was delivered to one-half of the class each of three consecutive years at one…

Purpose: To investigate the particular features of students who express the desire to follow a forensic career. Methods and materials: Three hundred and four 6th-year students attending the compulsory practice in forensic medicine in the academic year 2005-2006 were asked to fill in a self-administered questionnaire at the end of the course.…

Background: Previous studies have suggested an association between reasoning strategies and diagnostic success, but the influence on this relationship of variables such as question format and task difficulty, has not been studied. Our objective was to study the association between question format, task difficulty, reasoning strategies and…

The Tutotest is one of the few structured instruments developed for the assessment of students' learning skills in a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum. This study was designed to validate the Tutotest in a hybrid PBL curriculum. Forty-four tutors completed 370 evaluations on second to fourth year medical students at the end of the first…

The main purpose of this study was to examine the structural relationships between scientific epistemological views (SEVs) and information commitments (ICs) of high school students in Taiwan. Data were collected from 486 Taiwanese high school students via two self-reporting instruments: one was the SEV questionnaire, including five scales for…

Recent calls for border crossing between reading and science have heightened the need to support science teachers in integrating reading into science and to verify the robustness of this approach in the context of inquiry-based science. In this paper, we share what we did, found, and learned in a collaborative project in which a team of…

We hypothesized that instruction in the criteria of scientific arguments, in combination with constructivist epistemic beliefs, would produce greater learning about physics concepts. The study was a randomized experiment, where college undergraduates (n = 88) discussed, in pairs over the Web, several physics problems related to gravity and air…

Student Response Technology (SRT) involves the use of hand-held remotes by students during classroom lectures to electronically respond to questions. This study surveyed 350 students enrolled in one of 13 lower-division university science classes taught by five different instructors who used SRT. The survey probed students' perceptions of SRT in…

This article examines Mary Budd Rowe's groundbreaking and far-reaching contributions to science education. Rowe is best known for her research on wait-time: the idea that teachers can improve the quality and length of classroom discussions by waiting at least 3 s before and after student responses. Her wait-time research grew from and helped…

This paper presents a case study of science teaching in an eighth grade school classroom in India. It comes out of a larger ethnographic study done in 2005 that looked at how science was taught and learned in a rural government run middle school in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India. Subscribing to a sociocultural perspective, the paper presents…

The four essays reviewed here constitute a worthwhile attempt to discuss various aspects of postcolonial theory, and offer constructive ideas to ongoing academic as well as public conversations with respect to whether science education can meet the challenges of educating an increasingly diverse population in the 21st century. These essays are…

In this response to commentaries by Ali Sammel, Jhumki Basu and Alberto Rodriguez, I present my perspective on three important issues raised by the commentators. These issues relate to the role of a researcher in her field settings and society, the critique of science and science education as oppressive dominant discourses, and co-opting…

The radical philosophies of difference articulated by Deleuze and Guattari are just beginning to impinge the field of education although less so within science education. One common thread among the numerous concepts and neologisms (especially the rhizome) that have been coined is the necessity for thinking and acting in what they call…

In this paper I respond to Ajay Sharma's "Portrait of a Science Teacher as a Bricoleur: A case study from India," by speaking to two aspects of the bricoleur: the subject and the discursive in relation to pedagogic perspective. I highlight that our subjectivities are negotiated based on the desires of the similar and competing discourses we are…