From the contribution to the action approach: White teachers' experiences influencing the development of multicultural science curricula

In this exploratory case study, we sought to understand teacher's integration of multicultural curricula in science curriculum units, and how personal experiences influenced the level of integration in light of Bank's typology of ethnic content integration into school curricula. Five research participants volunteered and were selected so as to be representative of the demographic of pre‐service and in‐service teachers in the southern United States. The aim was to explore teachers' personal experiences with cultural others that either facilitated or impeded their adoption of multicultural curricula strategies in science curricula units. Case narratives present and discuss interview data and assigned curricula projects. Findings suggest that participants who had transformative cultural experiences and who identified as the marginalized cultural other, transformed science curricula at higher levels of Bank's typology for curricula' multicultural approaches. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 1271–1295, 2012     

The Nature of Scientific Explanation: Examining the perceptions of the nature,quality, and “goodness” of explanation among college students,science teachers,and scientists

Issues regarding scientific explanation have been of interest to philosophers from Pre-Socratic times. The notion of scientific explanation is of interest not only to philosophers, but also to science educators as is clearly evident in the emphasis given to K-12 students' construction of explanations in current national science education reform efforts. Nonetheless, there is a dearth of research on conceptualizing explanation in science education. Using a philosophically guided framework—the Nature of Scientific Explanation (NOSE) framework—the study aims to elucidate and compare college freshmen science students', secondary science teachers', and practicing scientists' scientific explanations and their views of scientific explanations. In particular, this study aims to: (1) analyze students', teachers', and scientists' scientific explanations; (2) explore the nuances about how freshman students, science teachers, and practicing scientists construct explanations; and (3) elucidate the criteria that participants use in analyzing scientific explanations. In two separate interviews, participants first constructed explanations of everyday scientific phenomena and then provided feedback on the explanations constructed by other participants. Major findings showed that, when analyzed using NOSE framework, participant scientists did significantly “better” than teachers and students. Our analysis revealed that scientists, teachers, and students share a lot of similarities in how they construct their explanations in science. However, they differ in some key dimensions. The present study highlighted the need articulated by many researchers in science education to understand additional aspects specific to scientific explanation. The present findings provide an initial analytical framework for examining students' and science teachers' scientific explanations.     

Investigations of a complex,realistic task: Intentional,unsystematic, and exhaustive experimenters

This study examines how students' experimentation with a virtual environment contributes to their understanding of a complex, realistic inquiry problem. We designed a week‐long, technology‐enhanced inquiry unit on car collisions. The unit uses new technologies to log students' experimentation choices. Physics students (n = 148) in six diverse high schools studied the unit and responded to pretests, posttests, and embedded assessments. We scored students' experimentation using four methods: total number of trials, variability of variable choices, propensity to vary one variable at a time, and coherence between investigation goals and experimentation methods. Students made moderate, significant overall pretest to posttest gains on physics understanding. Coherence was a strong predictor of learning, controlling for pretest scores and the other experimentation measures. We identify three categories of experimenters (intentional, unsystematic, and exhaustive) and illustrate these categories with examples. The findings suggest that students must combine disciplinary knowledge of the investigation with intentional investigation of the inquiry questions in order to understand the nature of the variables. Mechanically executing well‐established experimentation procedures (such as varying one variable at a time or comprehensively exploring the experimentation space) is less likely to lead students to valuable insights about complex tasks. Our proposed categories extend and refine previous efforts to categorize experimenters by linking scientific procedures with understanding of the science discipline. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 745–770, 2011     

Content-Related Interactions in Self-initiated Study Groups

The central goal of the present exploratory study was to investigate the nature of the content-related interactions in study groups independently organized by college organic chemistry students. We were particularly interested in the identification of the different factors that affected the emergence of opportunities for students to co-construct understanding and engage in higher levels of cognitive processing. Our results are based on the analysis of in situ observations of 34 self-initiated study sessions involving over a 100 students in three academic semesters. The investigation revealed three major types of social regulation processes, teaching, tutoring, and co-construction in the observed study sessions. However, the extent to which students engaged in each of them varied widely from one session to another. This variability was mostly determined by the specific composition of the study groups and the nature of the study tasks in which they were engaged. Decisions about how to organize the study session, the relative content knowledge and conceptual understanding expressed by the participants, as well as the cognitive level of the problems that guided group work had a strong impact on the nature of student interactions. Nevertheless, group talk in the observed study groups was mostly focused on low-level cognitive processes. The results of our work provide insights on how to better support students' productive engagement in study groups.     

The use of self‐learning modules to facilitate learning of basic science concepts in an integrated medical curriculum

This study used qualitative and quantitative approaches to evaluate the effectiveness of self‐learning modules (SLMs) developed to facilitate and individualize students' learning of basic medical sciences. Twenty physiology and nineteen microanatomy SLMs were designed with interactive images, animations, narrations, and self‐assessments. Of 41 medical students, 40 students voluntarily completed a questionnaire with open‐ended and closed‐ended items to evaluate students' attitudes and perspectives on the learning value of SLMs. Closed‐ended items were assessed on a five‐point Likert scale (5 = high score) and the data were expressed as mean ± standard deviation. Open‐ended questions further evaluated students' perspectives on the effectiveness of SLMs; student responses to open‐ended questions were analyzed to identify shared patterns or themes in their experience using SLMs. The results of the midterm examination were also analyzed to compare student performance on items related to SLMs and traditional sessions. Students positively evaluated their experience using the SLMs with an overall mean score of 4.25 (SD ± 0.84). Most students (97%) indicated that the SLMs improved understanding and facilitated learning basic science concepts. SLMs were reported to allow learner control, to help in preparation for subsequent in‐class discussion, and to improve understanding and retention. A significant difference in students' performance was observed when comparing SLM‐related items with non‐SLM items in the midterm examination (P < 0.05). In conclusion, the use of SLMs in an integrated basic science curriculum has the potential to individualize the teaching and improve the learning of basic sciences. Anat Sci Educ 3: 219–226, 2010. © 2010 American Association of Anatomists.     

An investigation of Zimbabwe high school chemistry students' laboratory work–based images of the nature of science

This study investigates the proximal and distal images of the nature of science (NOS) that A‐level students develop from their participation in chemistry laboratory work. We also explored the nature of the interactions among the students' proximal and distal images of the NOS and students' participation in laboratory work. Students' views of the NOS and the nature of their chemistry laboratory work were elicited through students' responses to an open‐ended questionnaire and semistructured interviews. The results suggest that students build some understandings of the NOS from their participation in laboratory work. Students' proximal NOS understandings appear to build into and interact with their understandings of the nature and practice of professional science. This interaction appears to be mediated by the nature of instruction. It is posited that each student's conceptual ecological system is replete with interactions, which govern attenuation of proximal understandings into distal images. Methodologically, the study illustrates how students' laboratory work–based proximal and distal images of the NOS can be identified and extracted through analyzing and interpreting their responses to protocols. Implications for A‐level Chemistry instruction and curriculum development are raised. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 43: 127–149, 2006     

Teachers' perspectives on environmental education in multicultural contexts: Towards culturally-responsive environmental education

This inquiry explores teachers' perspectives on enacting environmental education in a Québec urban locale with high student diversity. Participating in focus groups and interviews, teachers from three schools discussed their experiences incorporating environmental education into their multiculturally-diverse classrooms. Challenges included value clashes, a lack of common lived experiences, and reconciling contradictory educational perspectives and political policies, which often placed teachers in paradoxical positions. Findings suggest moving toward practices of culturally-responsive environmental education that demand more than awareness but include interactive dialogue. Teachers need support from beyond the classroom and the capacity to develop curriculum facilitating the inclusion of students' culture.     

Kindling fires: examining the potential for cumulative learning in a Journalism curriculum

This study investigated context-dependency of learning as an indicator for students' potential to continue learning after graduation. We used Maton's theoretical concepts of ‘cumulative’ and ‘segmented’ learning, and ‘semantic gravity’, to look for context-independent learning in students' assessments in a Journalism curriculum. We postulated whether the curriculum constrained or enabled cumulative learning. Students' responses to assessments were coded by their degree of context-dependency, or semantic gravity. We found that, firstly, students are overly successful in producing context-dependent answers but struggle to deliver context-independent responses. Secondly, students were not effective when they used higher level knowledge principles without the foundation of lower level ones. Lastly, the marking criteria were encouraging markers to reward context-dependent answers over context-independent ones. This study has implications for educators interested in curriculum design that enables cumulative learning in discipline specific contexts.     

Skill and will: The role of motivation and cognition in the learning of college chemistry

This study investigated how students' level of motivation and use of specific cognitive and self-regulatory strategies changed over time, and how these motivational and cognitive components in turn predicted students' course performance in chemistry. Participants were 458 students enrolled in introductory college chemistry classes. Participants' motivation and strategy use were assessed at three time points over the course of one semester using self-report instruments. Results showed an overall decline in students' motivational levels over time. There was also a decline in students' use of rehearsal and elaboration strategies over time; students' use of organizational and self-regulatory strategies increased over time. These trends, however, were found to vary by students' achievement levels. In terms of the relations of motivation and cognition to achievement, the motivational components of self-efficacy and task value were found to be the best predictors of final course performance even after controlling for prior achievement.     

Curricular orientations,experiences, and actions: Graduate students in science and mathematics fields work in urban high school classrooms

We examined curricular orientations that graduate students in science and mathematics fields held as they experienced urban high‐school science and mathematics classrooms. We analyzed how these educators (called Fellows) saw themselves, students, teachers, schools, education, and the sense they made of mathematics and science education in urban, challenging settings in the light of experiences they brought with them into the project and experiences they designed and engaged in as they worked in classrooms for 1 or 2 years. We used Schubert's (Schubert (1997) Curriculum: Perspective, paradigm, and possibility. New Jersey: Prentice‐Hall, Inc.) four curricular orientations—intellectual traditionalism, social behaviorism, experientialism, and critical reconstructionism—to analyze the Fellows' journals, and to explore ways in which the positions they portrayed relative to curriculum, instruction, assessment, social justice, discipline, student involvement, teacher's role, subject‐matter nature, etc., shaped and were shaped by who they were before and during their classroom work. Our qualitative analysis revealed various relationships including: experientialists engaged in more open‐ended projects, relevant to students, with explicit connections to everyday‐life experiences; social behaviorists paid more attention to designing “good” labs and activities that taught students appropriate content, led them through various steps, and modeled good science and mathematics; and critical reconstructionists hyped up student knowledge and awareness of science issues that affect students' lives, such as asthma and HIV epidemic. Categorizing orientations and identifying relationships between experiences, actions, and orientations may help us articulate and explicate goals, priorities, and commitments that we have, or ought to have, when we work in urban classrooms. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 1–26, 2009     

English language teaching curriculum in Iran: planning and practice

The present study investigates English language teaching (ELT) curriculum planning in Iran's Ministry of Education and its implementation by teachers. We studied programme evaluation; needs analysis; the ELT-specific documents; communication channels between planning and practice levels; teacher evaluation and student assessment; interpretation and re-examination of national policies within the Ministry; and the criteria set for ELT material development. Instrumentation included: curriculum documents; interviews with Ministry officials, material developers and headteachers; and teacher questionnaires. Results attested to the lack of any ELT-specific document for material development and absence of research-based needs assessment as the foundation of the programmes. Also, there are no pre-defined linguistic and professional criteria for evaluating teachers, and planning for students' assessment is limited to a set of general guidelines. Moreover, there is neither a programme evaluation nor an ELT evaluation model and national-level policies are not re-examined at planning level. Results also indicate that politico-ideological beliefs of material developers are as important as their expertise and communication channels between planning and practice levels are of a top-down nature. It is argued that the gap between planning and practice results from a highly centralised policymaking process in which local policymakers (i.e. teachers) are not involved.     

Developing communities of learners

This article describes some of the findings of an evaluation of a ‘cross- curricular’ digital media arts project for Year 8 students at Lister Community School in the London Borough of Newham. The project was designed to provide opportunities for a thematic curriculum in which quality learning encompassing both independent and collaborative learning was central. The project was also aimed at fostering a range of knowledge, skills and attitudes around students' personal and social development. The findings of the evaluation suggest that the project was successful in a number of ways: in enhancing students' personal and social development; in developing a community of learners in which learning was shared between teachers and students; in developing students' confidence and skills in their own learning; and in providing models of a more integrated and thematic curriculum.     

Testing one premise of scientific inquiry in science classrooms: Examining students' scientific explanations and student learning

In this study, we analyzed the quality of students' written scientific explanations found in notebooks and explored the link between the quality of the explanations and students' learning. We propose an approach to systematically analyzing and scoring the quality of students' explanations based on three components: claim, evidence to support it, and a reasoning that justifies the link between the claim and the evidence. We collected students' science notebooks from eight science inquiry‐based middle‐school classrooms in five states. All classrooms implemented the same scientific‐inquiry based curriculum. The study focuses on one of the implemented investigations and the students' explanations that resulted from it. Nine students' notebooks were selected within each classroom. Therefore, a total of 72 students' notebooks were analyzed and scored using the proposed approach. Quality of students' explanations was linked with students' performance in different types of assessments administered as the end‐of‐unit test: multiple‐choice test, predict‐observe‐explain, performance assessment, and a short open‐ended question. Results indicated that: (a) Students' written explanations can be reliably scored with the proposed approach. (b) Constructing explanations were not widely implemented in the classrooms studied despite its significance in the context of inquiry‐based science instruction. (c) Overall, a low percentage of students (18%) provided explanations with the three expected components. The majority of the sample (40%) provided only claims without any supporting data or reasoning. And (d) the magnitude of the correlations between students' quality of explanations and their performance, were all positive but varied in magnitude according to the type of assessment. We concluded that engaging students in the construction of high quality explanations may be related to higher levels of student performance. The opportunities to construct explanations in science‐inquiry based classrooms, however, seem to be limited. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 583–608, 2010     

Principal Leadership for Technology-enhanced Learning in Science

Reforms such as technology-enhanced instruction require principal leadership. Yet, many principals report that they need help to guide implementation of science and technology reforms. We identify strategies for helping principals provide this leadership. A two-phase design is employed. In the first phase we elicit principals’ varied ideas about the Technology-enhanced Learning in Science (TELS) curriculum materials being implemented by teachers in their schools, and in the second phase we engage principals in a leadership workshop designed based on the ideas they generated. Analysis uses an emergent coding scheme to categorize principals’ ideas, and a knowledge integration framework to capture the development of these ideas. The analysis suggests that principals frame their thinking about the implementation of TELS in terms of: principal leadership, curriculum, educational policy, teacher learning, student outcomes and financial resources. They seek to improve their own knowledge to support this reform. The principals organize their ideas around individual school goals and current political issues. Principals prefer professional development activities that engage them in reviewing curricula and student work with other principals. Based on the analysis, this study offers guidelines for creating learning opportunities that enhance principals’ leadership abilities in technology and science reform.     

Using Computers to Support a Beginning Teacher's Professional Development

This study explored the efficacy of promoting a beginning chemistry teacher's curriculum development and teaching practices through the use of computers. Using pictorial analogies, historical cases of science, and discrepant events in a web site designed by the researchers as curricular samples, the beginning teacher was asked to develop similar curriculum for his own teaching. After taking the researchers' advice into account and making adjustments, the beginning teacher implemented the curriculum in his classroom teaching and shared his experience with the researchers by e-mail communications. The teacher's teaching practices both before and after the web site treatment were observed and analyzed. It was found that before the treatment the teacher used the textbook as the only resource of his teaching. Extra curriculum was rarely seen, there were not many student-teacher interactions, and analogies or examples used in his explanation of abstract concepts were not preorganized. On the other hand, after the treatment, the teacher was able to develop suitable curricula by himself for the purpose of increasing student involvement. He also explained the applications of chemical concepts in daily lives and his analogies and demonstrations were well organized. Although the beginning teacher was able to develop curricula after the treatment, many aspects of his teaching can be improved, especially in the areas of student-teacher interaction and the implementation of students activities in science teaching.     

Contextualizing instruction: Leveraging students' prior knowledge and experiences to foster understanding of middle school science

Contextualizing science instruction involves utilizing students' prior knowledge and everyday experiences as a catalyst for understanding challenging science concepts. This study of two middle school science classrooms examined how students utilized the contextualizing aspects of project‐based instruction and its relationship to their science learning. Observations of focus students' participation during instruction were described in terms of a contextualizing score for their use of the project features to support their learning. Pre/posttests were administered and students' final artifacts were collected and evaluated. The results of these assessments were compared with students' contextualizing scores, demonstrating a strong positive correlation between them. These findings provide evidence to support claims of contextualizing instruction as a means to facilitate student learning, and point toward future consideration of this instructional method in broader research studies and the design of science learning environments. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 79–100, 2008     

多元文化整合教育理论视角下的民族地区校本课程开发

校本课程开发是民族地区基础教育改革的重要内容之一。多元文化整合教育理论应成为民族地区校本课程开发理论基础之一,因此需要在此基础上分析民族地区校本课程开发在课程目标的选择、课程内容的选择和组织及课程实施的方式三个方面的情况,并对存在的问题进行了深入探讨和研究。     

Exploring identities to deepen understanding of urban high school students' sexual health decision‐making

Sexual health is a controversial science topic that has received little attention in the field of science education, despite its direct relevance to students' lives and communities. Moreover, research from other fields indicates that a great deal remains to be learned about how to make school learning about sexual health influence the real‐life choices of students. In order to provide a more nuanced understanding of young people's decision‐making, this study examines students' talk about sexual health decision‐making through the lens of identities. Qualitative, ethnographic research methods with twenty 12th grade students attending a New York City public school are used to illustrate how students take on multiple identities in relation to sexual health decision‐making. Further, the study illustrates how these identities are formed by various aspects of students' lives, such as school, family, relationships, and religion, and by societal discourses on topics such as gender, individual responsibility, and morality. The study argues that looking at sexual health decision‐making—and at decision‐making about other controversial science topics—as tied to students' identities provides a useful way for teachers and researchers to grasp the complexity of these decisions, as a step toward creating curriculum that influences them. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:742–762, 2010