Predictive Relationships between Web and Human Resource Use and Middle School Students’ Interest in Science Careers: An Exploratory Analysis

This study investigated relationships among the use of web and human resource during science class and science career interest. Results suggested that levels of science career interest could be predicted based on classroom use of web and human resources. Regular use of human resources was predictive of science career interests for boys and girls. Use of web resources was only predictive of girls interests, on average, 7 points higher on a 36-point scale than girls who did not use web resources. Girls who used both resources scored 16 points higher than girls who used neither. Two other predictor variables found included (1) teachers who lacked science background and used web resources regularly and (2) level of student-centered instructional strategies used in the classroom. Further research is suggested.     

An Enquiry into the Influence of Mathematics on Students’ Choice of STEM Careers

Australia currently faces a skill shortage in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professions unlikely to improve if the current trend of low enrolments in high-level mathematics in secondary school continues. Many factors seem to contribute to this trend, and amongst them, research recognises student attitudes towards mathematics and careers in STEM. Research also shows that teachers and classroom practices are key agents to change these attitudes. This paper examines teachers’ perceptions of students’ attitudes towards mathematics and careers in STEM, as well as classroom practices emanating from those perceptions. Combining data from two studies, a large-scale survey and an intervention, we argue three main points: (1) student attitudes and teachers’ perceptions of those attitudes quite clearly differ, (2) targeted interventions showing links between mathematics and careers in STEM can have an influence on students’ perceptions of STEM careers and (3) an implementation of classroom ability grouping based on standardised test scores can be disadvantageous to students who have a natural inclination towards STEM and positive attitudes towards mathematics.     

An Analysis of Key Factors Affecting Chinese ESL Students’Listening

With the proposal of Internet-based CET,more emphasis need be attached to listening skill.In order to improve stu dents’ listening skill,linguistic knowledge,psychological factors and cultural background knowledge,as three key factors affect ing Chinese ESL students,have been analyzed and the improving solutions have been suggested.     

Students’ Reflections on Their Field Practicum: An Analysis of BSW Student Narratives

This qualitative study was undertaken to explore what undergraduate students reflect on during their learning to practice social work in the field. Reflection is essential in the social work field practicum where students learn the practice of social work by doing. Seventeen BSW students’ final field practicum learning papers are analyzed. Four themes emerge that highlight the content of their reflections: situations of uncertainty, opportunities for application, tensions in action, and confrontations with others. This article presents in detail these 4 themes. Discussion includes suggestions for helping students better engage in reflective learning.     

High School Students’ Perceptions of the Effects of International Science Olympiad on Their STEM Career Aspirations and Twenty-First Century Skill Development

Social cognitive theory guided the design of a survey to investigate high school students’ perceptions of factors affecting their career contemplations and beliefs regarding the influence of their participation in the international Science Olympiad on their subject interests and twenty-first century skills. In addition, gender differences in students’ choice of competition category were studied. Mixed methods analysis of survey returns from 172 Olympiad participants from 31 countries showed that students’ career aspirations were affected most by their teachers, personal interests, and parents, respectively. Students also indicated that they believed that their participation in the Olympiad reinforced their plan to choose a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major at college and assisted them in developing and improving their twenty-first century skills. Furthermore, female students’ responses indicated that their project choices were less likely to be in the engineering category and more likely to be in the environment or energy categories. Findings are discussed in the light of increasing the awareness of the role and importance of Science Olympiads in STEM career choice and finding ways to attract more female students into engineering careers.     

Collective Effects of Individual,Behavioral, and Contextual Factors on High School Students’ Future STEM Career Plans

This study explored the structural relationships among secondary school students’ conceptions, self-regulation, and strategies of learning science in mainland China. Three questionnaires, namely conceptions of learning science (COLS), self-regulation of learning science (SROLS), and strategies of learning science (SLS) were developed for investigating 333 Chinese high school learners’ conceptions, metacognitive self-regulation, and strategies in science. The confirmatory factor analysis results verified the validity of the three surveys. Moreover, the path analyses revealed a series of interesting findings. Learners with lower-level COLS, namely “memorizing,” “testing,” and “practicing and calculating,” tended to use surface learning strategies such as “minimizing scope of the study” and “rote learning.” However, learners’ higher-level COLS, namely “increase of knowledge,” “applying,” “understanding,” and “seeing in a new way,” had complicated connections with their SROLS and SLS. On the one hand, learners’ higher-level COLS had negative relations to “minimizing scope of the study” and “rote learning.” On the other hand, their higher-level COLS were powerful predicators for their metacognitive self-regulation and further affected their use of “deep strategy” and “rote learning.” Though Chinese secondary students with higher-level COLS usually have a negative view of “rote learning,” the functioning of their metacognitive self-regulation may change their initial attitudes towards the surface strategy. Learners with higher-level COLS still used “rote learning” as a prior step for achieving deep learning. Therefore, we concluded that the SROLS played an important mediating role between the COLS and SLS and may change learners’ original intention to utilize learning strategies.     

An Investigation of University Students and Professionals’ Professional STEM Identity Status

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Set amidst the backdrop of concerns related to the entry of students to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) careers, this study...     

Undergraduate Research or Research-Based Courses: Which Is Most Beneficial for Science Students?

Research in Science Education - Over the last 25 years, both research literature and practice-oriented reports have claimed the need for improving the quality of undergraduate science...     

An Analysis of Factors Influencing Cultural and Historical Students＇ Learning Higher Mathematics Well

数学技术在其他学科领域的广泛应用,使得高等数学成为越来越多非数学专业学生的必修课。然而,随着学习高等数学的人数的增加,出现的问题也越来越多,如学生不及格率逐年上升、教师负担增加、学生毕业压力增大等。笔者通过与学生访谈、发放调查问卷等方式最终确定了5个影响学生学好高数的主要因素,并针对每个影响因素给出了应对策略。     

School Efficiency and Student Subgroups: Is a Good School Good for Everyone?

State and federal accountability reforms are putting considerable pressure on schools to increase the achievement of historically low-performing groups of students and to close test score gaps. In this article, we exploit the differences among the large number of elementary schools in New York City to examine how much schools vary in the efficiency of the education they provide to subgroups. In addition, we examine the extent to which observable school characteristics can account for the variation that exists. We find that New York City elementary schools vary in how well they educate poor students compared to nonpoor students and Asian and White students compared to Black and Hispanic students. The disparities in school efficiency measures between boys and girls are lower than for the other subgroups. There is no conclusive evidence about which school resources and characteristics are associated with more or less efficient education across all subgroups.     

“My Three Wishes”: Hopes,Aspirations, and Concerns of Middle School Students

Inclusion in the general education classroom is becoming the placement of choice for many students with autism. Autism is a disorder that can impact many aspects of a child's learning experience. A child's profile along the continuum of Autism Spectrum Disorders dictates the severity of impairment in language engagement, social connectedness, sensory integration, and cognitive skills. This can often be overwhelming for teachers who are uninformed and untrained in the unique issues of autism. Teacher awareness and understanding of behaviors and perceptions unique to these disorders can facilitate the development and implementation of strategies created specifically to ease this potentially overwhelming situation for students and teachers.     

An Analysis of Factors That Cause Jude’s and Sue’s Tragedies

Hardy’s novels are dominated with an atmosphere of fatalism,as may be found in his Jude the Obscure.This paper aims to analyze the character of the hero and the heroine,Jude and Sue,by revealing the contradiction and inconsistency concealed in their desires and deeds.As rebellious as they are,Jude and Sue never escape the confines of conventionalities while confronted with conservative forces.It is not only because of overwhelming power of conservatism but also a tragedy out of their seemingly rebellious compromise.     

Student Motivation and Internet Technology: Are Students Empowered to Learn Science?

The Kids as Global Scientists (KGS) project engages students in the study of atmospheric science through the use of current imagery and on‐line communication in a reform‐minded, inquiry‐based curricular program. This article presents case study data on one sixth‐grade classroom of KGS participants during the 8‐week program. Six students representing three motivation levels were selected for intensive study to help illustrate how different students view learning science and the use of technology both before and after a technology‐rich program. Pre‐ and postassessment scores were analyzed for the entire class, and the six students' comments from individual interviews served as one example of voices for each motivation group. Results indicated that students made significant gains in weather content knowledge as measured by written assessments, and interviews revealed a high level of student motivation and satisfaction with the project. We conclude with a discussion of the program characteristics we believe are important for creating a learning environment that fosters the motivation and achievement we observed. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 459–479, 2000.     

Student Agency: an Analysis of Students’ Networked Relations Across the Informal and Formal Learning Domains

Agency is a construct facilitating our examination of when and how young people extend their own learning across contexts. However, little is known about the role played by adolescent learners’ sense of agency. This paper reports two cases of students’ agentively employing and developing science literacy practices—one in Singapore and the other in the USA. The paper illustrates how these two adolescent learners in different ways creatively accessed, navigated and integrated in-school and out-of-school discourses to support and nurture their learning of physics. Data were gleaned from students’ work and interviews with students participating in a physics curricular programme in which they made linkages between their chosen out-of-school texts and several physics concepts learnt in school. The students’ agentive moves were identified by means of situational mapping, which involved a relational analysis of the students’ chosen artefacts and discourses across time and space. This relational analysis enabled us to address questions of student agency—how it can be effected, realised, construed and examined. It highlights possible ways to intervene in these networked relations to facilitate adolescents’ agentive moves in their learning endeavours.     

Students’ Occupational Aspirations: Can Family Relationships Account for Differences Between Immigrant and Socioeconomic Groups?

Immigrant background and disadvantaged socioeconomic background are two key predictors of poorer school achievement in Europe. However, the former is associated with higher while the latter is associated with lower aspirations. This study asks whether family relationships account for this difference. Data come from 5,926 students in Germany and Sweden, eliciting indicators of family background and relationships at age 14–15 years (2011) and occupational aspirations 1 year later. High aspirations were found among students of non-European background and students with higher parental occupational status. Structural equation models showed that while immigrant families had greater parental aspirations and encouragement, family cohesion, and parental monitoring, only parental aspirations mediated the effects of family background.     

College Students’ Views of Work–Life Balance in STEM Research Careers: Addressing Negative Preconceptions

In career discussions, female undergraduates said that if they were to attend graduate school in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and were to follow a career based on their research training, they would have to give up having a family. A subsequent survey showed that many students, both men and women, thought work–life balance would be more difficult to achieve in a STEM research path than in other professions they were considering. Their views of STEM research being less family-friendly were more pronounced on issues of parental leaves and caring for children than finding a spouse/partner and landing two jobs in the same locality. To provide role models of work–life balance in STEM professions, we convened panels of dual-career couples who described how they worked together to raise their children while advancing their scientific careers. Our selection of panelists and topics of discussion were based on findings of social science research on work–life balance. On a survey with the same questions administered afterward, the changes in paired responses of male and female students with respect to all four issues showed a significant shift toward thinking that a research-based STEM career would be no more difficult than other careers they were considering.     

Students’ Choice: Recommendations for Environmental and Instructional Changes in School

This study investigated 134 middle school students’ suggestions concerning environmental and instructional changes based on their individual learning-style Inventories. The results of the study determined that students could suggest environmental and instructional changes that differed from the accustomed traditional environments and instruction encountered on a daily basis.     

An Investigation of Junior Middle School Students’English Learning Motivation and Motivating Strategies

English learning motivation plays a more and more important role in junior middle school students’ study,and it is necessary for students to learn English effectively.Therefore,teachers should take responsibilities for stimulating students’ English learning motivation.This present thesis investigates 63 students who are from class 1 grade 1,class 2 grade 1 and class 3 grade 1 in NanJie country junior middle school in LinYing town LuoHe city by the way of questionnaire.And the thesis discusses the source of students’ learning motivation,for the purpose of putting forward strategies of motivating students’ English learning motivation in accordance with students’ type of motivation.     

Teachers’ Role in Students’ Learning at a Project-Based STEM High School: Implications for Teacher Education

International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education - This study explored how teachers engage and support students at a project-based STEM high school to identify key elements defining...