Creative and critical thinking (C&CT) capabilities are essential qualities of future ready scientific literate citizens. As teacher educators, developing C&CT in science pre-service teachers (PSTs) requires supporting PSTs' development of C&CT, in addition to supporting their understanding and capacity to teach for development of…

Research on the STEM educational pipeline has focused on degree attainment, finding that students who take STEM courses in high school are more likely to declare a STEM major later on (Gottfried & Bozick, "Education Finance and Policy" 11:177-202, 2016) and tend to perform better in college (Sadler & Tai, "Science…

This study aimed to assess the impact of problem-based learning (PBL) on students' achievement in mechanical waves among secondary schools in South Western Uganda. Four hundred and nineteen students (419) from 19 schools were involved in this study. A quasi-experimental research method was employed through Solomon's four-group design. Form six…

High-stakes testing (HST) is critical in the educational system of East-Asian countries like China, and the ongoing standards-based reform in many Western countries like the USA. HST has been criticized for corrupting an educational system through means like disengaging students from authentic learning. It seems that students' affective learning…

Remote access technology in STEM education fills dual roles as an educational tool to deliver science education (Educational Technology) and as a means to teach about technology itself (Technology Education). A five-lesson sequence was introduced to 11 and 12-year-old students at an urban school. The lesson sequences were inquiry-based, hands-on,…

Growing interest in interdisciplinary (ID) understanding has led to the recent development of four ID assessments, none of which have previously been comprehensively validated. Sources of evidence for the validity of tests include construct validity, such as the internal structure of the test. ID tests may (and should) test both disciplinary (D)…

Classroom dialogues have special educational value because they allow students to engage critically but constructively with each other's ideas, solve scientific problems jointly and develop their scientific understanding. The present study focuses on how groups of twelfth-grade high school and university students communicate and co-operate through…

This study developed and validated an assessment that measures interdisciplinary understanding using the topic of carbon cycling, the Interdisciplinary Science Assessment for Carbon Cycling (ISACC). This work was motivated by the need to assess interdisciplinary understanding, defined as the ability to solve problems requiring knowledge and skills…

This study explored how productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) is associated with the level of cognitive activity and collective group outcome in collaborative learning across multiple contexts. Traditionally, PDE has been studied in a single collaborative learning environment, without analysis of how these environments fulfill the supporting…

Student teachers struggle to identify themselves as teachers in their field placement during their student teaching year, and some of the difficulty can be attributed to the change they encounter when they must communicate scientific ideas to students in a language that differs from how they recently learned science at the university level. Using…

This study explores the implications of a redesign of a college course that entailed a new partnership between a college neuroscience classroom and a high school. In this course, the college students engaged in original research projects which included conducting brain surgery and behavioural tests on rats. They used digital storytelling and…

Low enrolment in undergraduate level physics programmes has drawn the attention of the relevant disciplines, education policy-makers, and researchers worldwide. Many reports released during the previous decades attempt to identify the factors that attract young people to study science, but only few of them focus explicitly on physics. In Greece,…

In this article, we turn our attention to context-based approaches to science instruction. We studied the effects of changes to a set of secondary science teacher education programs, all of which were redesigned with attention to the Secondary Science Teaching with English Language and Literacy Acquisition (SSTELLA) instructional framework, a…

An exploratory case study involving six grade 9 science teachers was undertaken to probe how teachers' understanding of learners' misconceptions relate to their perceptions about teaching simple circuits. The participants' understanding of documented misconceptions in electricity were explored by means of a questionnaire, while their perceptions…

Futures studies is usually a transdisciplinary study and as such embraces the physical world of the sciences and system sciences and the subjective world of individuals and cultures, as well as the time dimension--past, present and futures. Science education, where student interests, opportunities and challenges often manifest themselves, can…