The labour market for young STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) graduates requires flexibility and adaptability, which may potentially conflict with the spreading worldwide tendency toward delayed graduation. This is a cause for concern among academicians, policy makers and practitioners at all levels, as it may generate important…

A comparative gender framework and cross-national data are used to examine women's access to STEM education in Poland and cross-nationally. The transition to STEM occupations is also considered. Findings on indicators of girl's achievement in STEM education at the secondary level in Poland show gender imbalance, but Poland is doing better than…

The so-called leaking STEM pipeline (dropout in STEM education) has been the subject of many studies. The large interest of scholars in plausible causes of this leakage has resulted in a number of meta-reviews describing factors at system, school and student level related to interest and persistence in STEM education. The STEM pipeline discussion…

This investigation examined outcomes associated with nature of science (NOS) instruction along a science-content context continuum on the development of secondary preservice science teachers' conceptions of and plans to teach NOS, moving beyond the common dichotomy of contextualized versus noncontextualized instruction. Participants comprised six…

This paper presents two South African case studies designed to explore the influence of subject matter knowledge on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). In the first case study on teaching the mole in two township schools, the findings illustrate that the participant teachers favoured procedural approaches at the expense of conceptual…

This paper addresses the concept of geological time as used by students who face tasks that demand three types of skills: to locate events in time, to order them according to time calendar, and to manage time intervals. The empirical study consisted of asking high school students as well as technical school students to carry out tasks that…