Poetry can be used during science instruction to foster interest, excitement, and wonder among elementary-level students. Children can read poetry, or have poetry read to them, as a way of learning about their world. They can also create poems to share their own science learning with others. We introduce two formats of the Poetry in Two Voices…

This study examines teacher interactions with boys and girls in single-gender technology classes. We analyzed transcripts of videotapes of instruction, interviews with the teachers and students, student questionnaires, and final robot programs. Girls and boys differed in a number of ways, and teachers explained their differing interactions with…

During the last quarter of a century, it became abundantly clear that the desired reforms in science teaching and learning could not be accomplished without significant professional development of in-service science teachers. Yet, there was a dearth of effective professional development models that could lead to the kind of instructional reforms…

This paper discusses the concept of scaling and its biological and engineering applications. Scaling, in a scientific context, means proportional adjustment of the dimensions of an object so that the adjusted and original objects have similar shapes yet different dimensions. The paper provides an example of a hands-on, minds-on activity on scaling…

Teaching the connectedness of relationships among elements in the Periodic Table is often an overwhelming task, and can result in shallow student understanding. This article contains a series of activities that evoke student prior knowledge about classification, leads them to discover periodicity and other relationships among the characteristics…

This paper describes a novel science education initiative developed for 8-to 12-year-old children by the Biomedical Diagnostics Institute at Dublin City University, Ireland. "Me and My Body" (MAMBO) is an interactive, multi-faceted programme that enables children to explore and understand the dynamic physiological parameters of the human…

Much of the general population is aware of terms such as biotechnology, genetic engineering, and genomics. However, there is a lack of understanding concerning these fields among many secondary school students. Few teaching models exist to explain concepts behind genomics and even less are available for teaching the visually impaired and blind.…

Our main goal in this study was to explore whether the use of models in high school molecular genetics instruction can contribute to students' understanding of concepts and processes in genetics. Three hundred and nineteen students from four comparable groups of 11th- and 12th-grade students participated. The control group (116 students) was…

This paper examines the merits of the proposition that outdoors environmental education can be used as a means to promote reconciliation, and in essence peace, among communities in Cyprus. It does so through an examination of an outdoors youth program called CAFE (Camping, Fitness, and Education) that aimed to promote the awareness of members of…

How to make learning more interesting is a basic challenge for school education. In this Finnish study, the international ROSE questionnaire was used to survey, during spring of 2003, the relationship between interest in biology and out-of-school experiences for 3626 ninth-grade pupils. Interest and experience factors were extracted by using the…

This study reports on a science professional development initiative with elementary school teachers in Canada. Grades 4 and 5 teachers were involved in the implementation and modification of science kits, together with corresponding professional development activities. Each kit was aligned to specific outcomes in the curriculum and provided a…

We should dispense with use of the confusing term "null hypothesis" in educational research reports. To explain why the term should be dropped, the nature of, and relationship between, scientific and statistical hypothesis testing is clarified by explication of (a) the scientific reasoning used by Gregor Mendel in testing specific…

This article discusses the role of imagination in science education. It provides a justification for imaginative thinking in the context of school science, as well as some strategies that can be implemented by science teachers in their classrooms.

There is a large number of relationships between organisms in communities, and these relationships comprise the following types: predation and parasitism, commensalism, protocooperation and mutualism, neutralism, amensalism, and competition. The possible effects of the relationship between two species are that one or the other can benefit (+),…

This study proposes an empirical classification of ways to introduce elements of the history of science into science teaching, as well as describing a special way to do so characterized by the introduction of short extracts from historical texts. The aim is to motivate students to participate in problem-solving activities and to transform their…