The researcher aims to investigate Saudi science teachers' beliefs about learning and teaching issues. The sample consisted of 247 middle school teachers in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The study conducted in the academic school year 2014/2015, and utilized a questionnaire and an interview that included 10% of the sample. The questionnaire targeted the…

In recent years, researchers have shown an interest in understanding students' own ideas about basic chemical principles and guiding them through innovative ways to gain conceptual understanding where necessary. This research was a case study designed to assess 50 first year high school students' conceptual understanding about changes in matter,…

In this mixed methods study, the researchers developed a video-based measure called a "Prediction Assessment" to determine preservice elementary teachers' abilities to predict students' scientific reasoning. The instrument is based on teachers' need to develop pedagogical content knowledge for teaching science. Developing a knowledge…

We report our research of seven pairs of students enrolled in the second semester of sophomore-level organic chemistry as they attempted to describe (in their own words) and draw, respectively, three electron-pushing diagrams of three-step reaction mechanisms. The tasks' objective was to accurately reproduce the diagrams based solely on the…

The Teaching for Transformative Experiences in Science (TTES) model was designed to facilitate the application of academic learning in students' everyday experiences. In the current study, we describe a 2-year design-based intervention that aimed to further develop and evaluate the TTES model. In the first year, a teacher implemented the TTES…

The benefits of field courses for biological science students are well established, but field courses also have limitations: they are generally too brief to allow significant research and they are staff-designed and led, limiting the development of student autonomy. In contrast, the value of student-organised field expeditions has been little…

The teleological bias, a major learning obstacle, involves explaining biological phenomena in terms of purposes and goals. To probe the teleological bias, researchers have used acceptance judgement tasks and preference judgement tasks. In the present study, such tasks were used with German high school students (N = 353) for 10 phenomena from human…

The purposes of the present study are to elicit pre-service elementary science teachers' scientific and pseudoscientific beliefs about earthquake and to make inferences about their understandings of science. Although the subject of earthquake is not a pseudoscientific area, some pseudoscientific beliefs related to earthquake were used in this…

Students in senior pre-university education encounter difficulties in the application of mathematics into physics. This paper presents the outcome of an explorative qualitative study of teachers' beliefs about improving the transfer of algebraic skills from mathematics into physics. We interviewed 10 mathematics and 10 physics teachers using a…

A new, interdisciplinary high school geoarchaeology curriculum unit, titled "Living with Volcanoes," was created and tested in two pilot lessons with 30 high school students total studying geography and classical civilization in northern England. Students were highly engaged during the curriculum unit and showed positive learning gains…

'Literacy in the Science Classroom Project" was a three-year professional development (PD) program supporting minority-language secondary teachers' use of effective language-based instructional strategies for teaching science. Our primary objective was to determine how teacher beliefs and practices changed over time and how these were enacted…

A socioscientific issues integrated instruction was used in the study to resolve college students attitude towards sexually-themed science content. Some 200 college students participated in the study as experimental and control groups. The former consisting of 98 students from one college was taught the content using the socioscientific issues…

The present article analyses the changes in practices, ideas, and attitudes proposed by a group of novice science teachers during a further education teacher training program. The research on which it is based is focused on monitoring the training program and its impact on the participating teachers. The training program has as its starting point…

Scientific literacy should be promoted through the teaching of science from Grade R and for this to happen, teachers need to understand what science should be taught and how it should be taught. This interpretive, qualitative study explores the degree to which four foundation phase teachers interpret the life skills programme with regard to the…

The purpose of study is to investigate the fifth graders' understandings of the basic astronomy concept and, if they have, to define their misconceptions and then to determine what reason/s behind them. For this purpose, two hundred seventy fifth grade students from 6 different schools participated. Randomly selected 45 students performing under…