Analyzes Australian students' public and private statements to themselves and their peers collected in the course of a multiyear study of teacher management of communication in cooperative learning groups. Data reflect how students perceived and responded to subtle features in the public enactment of the curriculum, the task, and the setting…

Evaluates the introduction of in-class cooperative learning in a large lecture college physics sequence. Results indicate that cooperative learning sessions helped the students achieve at a higher level than expected. Concludes that in-class cooperative learning addressed student concerns about the learning environment and was perceived as an…

Investigates the metacognitive development of students in a second year chemical engineering course which had such development as an explicit goal. Concludes, among other results, that there is a shift in student approach from a focus on solving problems towards a stronger valuing of conceptual understanding. (Author/MM)

Reports on a study involving two each year-12, undergraduate and postgraduate Australian students. Elicits learners' mental models for chemical bonding using semi-structured interviews comprising a three-phase interview protocol. Concludes that learners across all three academic levels preferred simple, realistic mental models for chemical…

Presents findings of the images of science drawn upon in laboratory work by upper secondary and university students in academic streams with a science focus. Questions required students to comment on laboratory investigations carried out by research scientists or science students. Shows that students' reasoning has an epistemological and an…

Describes the author's difficulties in teaching students who were ethnically, culturally, and socially different from himself. Emphasizes the significance of connecting the enacted curriculum to the interests and extant knowledge of students. Suggests some implications for teaching science, enacting and appropriating science curricula, and…

Investigates the views of 10 university chemistry lecturers, 85 pre-service chemistry teachers, and 23 chemistry students on the particulate level of a chemical reaction. (Author/CCM)

Presents an investigation into associations between students' (n=3215) perceptions of their interactions with teachers, the cultural background of students, and their attitudinal and cognitive achievement outcomes. Finds that students' attitude scores were higher in classrooms in which students perceived greater leadership, helping/friendly, and…

Describes three physics-related structured discussion tasks developed in cooperation with high school physics teachers. Presents the reactions of teachers and students to classroom use of the tasks. (Contains 23 references.) (Author/WRM)

Discusses results from a study that explored the relationships between designerly thinking and behaviors situated in elementary classrooms in Ontario, Canada and Great Britain. Focuses on the 'school situated design' evidence from the study. (Contains 27 references.) (DDR)

This study reports on teaching practices in science classrooms of Indonesian lower secondary schools in rural areas. Using six schools from three districts in the province of Kalimantan Selatan as the sample, this study found that most teaching practices in science classrooms in rural schools were teacher-centred with students copying notes.…

This paper is about a study into the nature of analogies recorded from three Form 2 (Grade 10) classes in Kenya, instructed by three physics teachers. Through a case study method involving classroom observation, several analogies were recorded and analysed. These analogies were predominantly "environmental" (drawn from students'…

An elementary version of the "Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction" (QTI) and a scale for determining students' "Enjoyment of their Science Lessons" (ENJ) were translated into Standard Malay. This process, together with its initial validation carried out in 136 classrooms with 3,104 students, is described in this paper.…

The results of a large scale (N=1001) cross-sectional (Years 6, 8 and 10) study of students' ideas about the composition of unpolluted air, the nature of air pollution, the biological consequences of air pollution, and about acid rain and the Greenhouse Effect are reported. A range of persistent alternative conceptions were identified, in some…