The late 20th century and beginning of 21st century have witnessed unprecedented rapid economic development due to advances in technology and globalization. In response to this development, a renewed call for science literacy has become louder in the USA and many other countries. Common to all science education reforms around the world is emphasis…

The focus of this paper is on selected recent South African research studies that have explored efforts to promote the discussion, writing, and arguing aspects of scientific literacy in primary and middle schools, particularly amongst second-language learners. These studies reveal improvements in the participants' abilities to both use the…

Education and political leaders worldwide are increasingly placing emphasis on developing scientific literacy. This also is the case in Thailand with science education influenced by educational reform in 1999, in which the goals of science education are shaped by the notion of scientific literacy. Thai science education emphasizes the scientific…

This paper describes the design of an educational module which aims to raise awareness and change the attitudes of elementary school students about focal endangered species in protected areas. The proposed design builds on, and extends the General Teaching Model. The educational module which was developed through this approach was pilot-tested in…

This paper outlines the results of a collaborative effort between members of staff in the Departments of Life Sciences and Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, which involved the implementation of Writing Across the Curriculum strategies in an Ecology course. The lecturer for this course had expressed concerns regarding the poor quality of the…

Sociocognitive conflict has been used as a teaching strategy which may contribute to change students' conceptions about science concepts. The present paper aims at investigating the structure of the dialogic argumentation developed by students, when they are involved in science teaching sequence that have been designed to change their conceptions…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the attitudes and classroom practices of environmental science faculty members in Jordanian universities. Mix data collection methodology was employed to collect data in this study. In addition to the developed survey, several participants' interviews and classroom observations were conducted with…

The aim of this study was to investigate if integrating basic analytical methods and computer interface technology would result in a positive change in student attitude. Students' self-concept of science knowledge and skills (Capability), opinion towards science (Affect), and perceptions of the value of science (Value) were determined with…

Determination of conceptual problems which may cause alternative conceptions in science and technology textbooks is significant to increase in success of pupils and teachers. It is a vital issue to arrange books in a way removing or decreasing these faults in order to improve a better education via textbooks. This study aims to determine…

Global warming and climate change have become hot topics that incite debate, inspire scientific research, and influence international policy. However, the scientific research that provides the past climate and environmental information upon which contemporary environmental change is measured, receives little attention in high school curriculum.…

Betty's Brain is a computer-based learning environment that capitalizes on the social aspects of learning. In Betty's Brain, students instruct a character called a Teachable Agent (TA) which can reason based on how it is taught. Two studies demonstrate the "protege effect": students make greater effort to learn for their TAs than they do for…

Drawing on game-design principles and an underlying situated theoretical perspective, we developed and researched a 3D game-based curriculum designed to teach water quality concepts. We compared undergraduate student dyads assigned randomly to four different instructional design conditions where the content had increasingly level of…

The decline of enrollments in agronomy programs across the United States has been a concern for more than a decade. In an effort to reverse this trend, the Agronomy Department at Iowa State University (ISU) launched the "I'm An Agronomist" marketing campaign in 2006. This article reports on these efforts and the change in the undergraduate…

Undergraduate enrollment in natural resources-related programs are 13% lower than they were 30 years ago, even though overall collegiate enrollment has increased by roughly 8.5 million students during the same period. Because of this, we decided to investigate the question of student retention in a fisheries and wildlife (FW) program from the…

Effective advising includes communicating to students the attributes employers seek and the signals they use in detecting those attributes. Using an Internet survey of more than 400 college graduate employers, this study asks employers how useful various signals are in determining job candidates' level of attributes including number crunching…