In recent years, the Australian Government has invested heavily ($2.4 b) into the Digital Education Revolution with initiatives that aim at increasing ICT proficiencies in teachers and school leaders and equipping Years 9-12 students with a laptop each. Such initiatives should be welcomed by the science education community as ICT offers…

Children of Generation Y are entering our schooling system. These children have always known instant communication and the internet. They possess basic skills in using technology, but they still need to develop a deeper understanding of technology. Teaching longitudinally will increase the learner's confidence and develop a deeper understanding.…

"Teaching Science" has, as one of its predecessors, the "Investigating" journal, which first appeared in 1988. Looking back ten years, the winner of the "Most Valuable Paper Award" for 1999 was Kimberley Pressick-Kilborn for her article--"Steps to Fostering a Learning Community in the Primary Science Classroom". In this edition of "Teaching…

When students make the transition from one curriculum to another, with significant overlap of content, the challenge is not so much to impart new information but rather to tap into students' existing knowledge base. The purpose of this study was to determine if achievement in an external examination that requires analysis could be enhanced by the…

Orchestrating inquiry-based science learning in the classroom is a complex undertaking. It requires fitting the culture of the classroom with the teacher's teaching and inquiry practices. To understand the interactions between these variables in relation to student learning, we conducted an investigation in two different classroom settings to…

To improve retention and engagement, first-year college science majors enrolled in University Experience orientation courses participated in a hands-on laboratory research experience: a DNA barcoding project to facilitate species identification. Students collected arthropods and hypothesized morphology-based species identifications. Then they…

Science teaching and learning can be made both engaging and student-centered using pedagogical, computer-based learning tools. We have developed self-paced interactive problem-solving tutorials for introductory physics. These tutorials can provide guidance and support for a variety of problem-solving techniques, as well as opportunities for…

Phase changes in water are experienced in everyday life but students often struggle to understand mechanisms that regulate them. Human thermal comfort is closely related to humidity, evaporative heat loss and heat transfer. The purpose of the present study is to assist students in the evaluation of human thermal comfort. Such a goal is achievable…

This case study documents the struggles and successes encountered by a pre-calculus teacher while using Classroom Connectivity Technology (CCT) daily in her community college mathematics course. CCT refers to a wireless communication system that connects a teacher's computer with an individual student's handheld calculator and has been associated…

In schools, learning spatial geometry is usually dependent upon a student's ability to visualize three dimensional geometric configurations from two dimensional drawings. Such a process, however, often creates visual obstacles which are unique to spatial geometry. Useful software programs which realistically depict three dimensional geometric…

Students in 4 Canadian high school physics classes completed instructional sequences in two key physics topics related to motion--Straight Line Motion and Newton's First Law. Different sequences of laboratory investigation, teacher explanation (lecture) and the use of computer-based scientific visualizations (animations and simulations) were…

The purpose of our modeling effort is to predict future outcomes. We assume the data collected are both accurate and relatively precise. For our oscillating data, we examined several mathematical modeling forms for predictions. We also examined both ignoring the oscillations as an important feature and including the oscillations as an important…

This study examined the influence of virtual manipulatives on different achievement groups during a teaching experiment in four fifth-grade classrooms. During a two-week unit focusing on two rational number concepts (fraction equivalence and fraction addition with unlike denominators) one low achieving, two average achieving, and one high…

The study deals with the development of an analogy-integrated e-learning module on Cellular Respiration, which is intended to facilitate conceptual understanding of students with different brain hemisphere dominance and learning styles. The module includes eight analogies originally conceptualized following the specific steps used to prepare…

We conducted a series of summer workshops on bioinformatics to increase educators' knowledge of this new field of inquiry with the assumption that their knowledge will, in turn, impact student achievement. The workshops incorporated experiential learning and self-reflection (Loucks-Horsley et al. 1998). Educators demonstrated significant increases…