The Impact of Teachers and Their Science Teaching on Students’ ‘Science Interest’: A four-year study

There is a crisis in school science in Australia and this may be related to insufficient students developing an interest in science. This extended study looked at changes in 14 students’ interest in science as they moved through junior secondary school into Year 10. Although the majority of these students still had an interest in science in Year 10, it had fluctuated for most students from year to year. The presence or absence of simple, but effective, teaching practices, identified by these students, seems to suggest one way to retain or improve situational and, it would appear, in several cases, personal interest.     

The Non-Tested Years: Policy’s Impact on Early Childhood Curriculum

Early childhood and elementary education emerged from a variety of knowledge and research bases. Tensions emerged as they were brought together in a unified public kindergarten through 12th-grade educational system. This review describes how standards and accountability policies have exacerbated tensions between early childhood and elementary curriculum and instructional approaches and impacted the voice and role of early childhood educators. We argue that this is a critical time for understanding and addressing these issues.     

Science Letters:The Moore’s Law for photonic integrated circuits

INTRODUCTION Photonic circuits are currently many orders of magnitude larger in physical dimensions than their electronic counterparts. Whereas FET type transistors have lengths on the order of 50 nm, passive optical devices, even those based on photonic crystals, have sizes on the order the wavelength, 1 μm for customary telecom applications. For active devices the sizes are even larger, at least in length, essentially depending on the matrix element of the interaction in question. Reg…     

Science Students’ Classroom Discourse: Tasha’s Umwelt

Over the past twenty-five years researchers have been concerned with understanding the science student. The need for such research is still grounded in contemporary issues including providing opportunities for all students to develop scientific literacy and the failure of school science to connect with student’s lives, interests and personal identities. The research reported here is unusual in its use of discourse analysis in social psychology to contribute to an understanding of the way students make meaning in secondary school science. Data constructed for the study was drawn from videotapes of nine consecutive lessons in a year-seven science classroom in Melbourne, post-lesson video-stimulated interviews with students and the teacher, classroom observation and the students’ written work. The classroom videotapes were recorded using four cameras and seven audio tracks by the International Centre for Classroom Research at the University of Melbourne. Student talk within and about their science lessons was analysed from a discursive perspective. Classroom episodes in which students expressed their sense of personal identity and agency, knowledge, attitude or emotion in relation to science were identified for detailed analysis of the function of the discourse used by students, and in particular the way students were positioned by others or positioned themselves. This article presents the discursive Umwelt or life-space of one middle years science student, Tasha. Her case is used here to highlight the complex social process of meaning making in science classrooms and the need to attend to local moral orders of rights and duties in research on student language use, identity and learning in science.     

The dolphin’s grammatical competency: Comments on Kako (1999)

Kako (1999) reviews the evidence for syntactic competencies in several animal species exposed to artificial language systems, emphasizing the importance of core syntactic properties such as argument structure and closed-class items. We present evidence from our dolphin studies for the acquisition of the closed-class functionality of demonstratives, prepositions, conjunctions, and locatives. Sensitivity to argument structure is also evidenced by wholly untrained and consistent interpretations of the dolphin to probes of anomalous syntactic structures. These results are generated within our comprehension-based paradigm, which enables us to provide convincing objective evidence for the development and generalization of concepts by the dolphin subject. Demonstrations of animal language competencies may illuminate certain aspects of human linguistic competence by suggesting that the particular modeled subsets can derive from general cognitive mechanisms, rather than language-specific ones.     

Getting at the Mathematics: Sara’s Journal

In this paper, we discuss issues in planning and conducting research into mathematics learning. We emphasize two central themes: (a) the learners mathematics (especially the issues and ideas, in given problem situations, that learners choose to think about and to present) and (b) the kinds of knowledge that learners may be building (including their ideas about what mathematics is, and how people do, learn, use, communicate and understand it). While the first theme is at least partly mathematical, the second interweaves cognition and epistemology. Anchored in student data from an extended classroom teaching experiment in the mathematics of change, we focus on key choices needed to build narratives to help researchers capture, in detail, how students engage with mathematics in extended problem explorations.     

India’s National Science Talent Search Examination (1963–1976)

Science & Education - India’s National Science Talent Search (NSTS) examination (1963 to 1976) was imagined and implemented by some top scientists of the period. It aimed to identify...     

An Informal Science Education Program’s Impact on STEM Major and STEM Career Outcomes

Research in Science Education - While there is extensive evidence that STEM careers can be important pathways for augmenting social mobility and for increasing individual prestige, many youth...     

The Impact of a Geospatial Technology-Supported Energy Curriculum on Middle School Students’ Science Achievement

Geospatial technologies are increasingly being integrated in science classrooms to foster learning. This study examined whether a Web-enhanced science inquiry curriculum supported by geospatial technologies promoted urban middle school students’ understanding of energy concepts. The participants included one science teacher and 108 eighth-grade students classified in three ability level tracks. Data were gathered through pre/posttest content knowledge assessments, daily classroom observations, and daily reflective meetings with the teacher. Findings indicated a significant increase in the energy content knowledge for all the students. Effect sizes were large for all three ability level tracks, with the middle and low track classes having larger effect sizes than the upper track class. Learners in all three tracks were highly engaged with the curriculum. Curriculum effectiveness and practical issues involved with using geospatial technologies to support science learning are discussed.     

The Stranger Within: Dostoevsky’s underground

Abstract

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s influential novel Notes from underground, we find one of the most memorable characters in nineteenth century literature. The Underground Man, around whom everything else in this book revolves, is in some respects utterly repugnant: he is self-centred, obsessive and cruel. Yet he is also highly intelligent, honest and reflective, and he has suffered significantly at the hands of others. Reading Notes from underground can be a harrowing experience but also an educative one, for in an encounter with what at first seems unfamiliar and disorienting we can awaken the ‘stranger within’. Dostoevsky’s work, if we are ready for it, can shake us from our slumbers and allow us to see that what appears to be strange may in fact be deeply familiar to us.     

Bringing Up Girls in Science (BUGS): The Effectiveness of an Afterschool Environmental Science Program for Increasing Female Students’ Interest in Science Careers

Bringing Up Girls in Science (BUGS) was an afterschool program for 4th and 5th grade girls that provided authentic learning experiences in environmental science as well as valuable female mentoring opportunities in an effort to increase participants’ academic achievement in science. BUGS participants demonstrated significantly greater amounts of gain in science knowledge as measured by the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in Science (ITBS-S). The original BUGS participants and contrasts have now completed high school and entered college, allowing researchers to assess the long-term impact of the BUGS program. Fourteen former BUGS participants completed two instruments to assess their perceptions of science and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. Their results were compared to four contrast groups composed entirely of females: 12 former BUGS contrasts, 10 college science majors, 10 non-science majors, and 9 current STEM professionals. Results indicate that BUGS participants have higher perceptions of science careers than BUGS contrasts. There were no significant differences between BUGS participants, Science Majors, and STEM professionals in their perceptions of science and STEM careers, whereas the BUGS contrast group was significantly lower than BUGS participants, Science Majors, and STEM Professionals. Additional results and implications are discussed within.     

Emerging: An Art Field Placement’s Impact on Practice

ABSTRACT

This exploratory study examined the experiences of 9 stakeholders in an art gallery field placement during their social work education. The study sought to understand how the nontraditional field placement prepared students for practice. In addition, personality traits of students that best fit the placement was examined. Findings suggest that students had been prepared to engage in a variety of practice behaviors, work independently, and be more creative. However, they also felt that the field placement setting did not give them enough direct practice opportunities. The two most salient personality traits were being flexible and an initiator.     

The Role of Drawing in Young Children’s Construction of Science Concepts

It has been observed that many young children like making marks on paper and that they enjoy the activity. It is also known that children’s drawings are vehicles for expression and communication. Therefore, it would be logical and reasonable for teachers to incorporate children’s drawings into building science concepts. To demonstrate how drawings are utilized to help a child to acquire a science concept, the article first presents a vignette of an interaction between an adult and a 5-year-old boy, focusing on the science concept of the physical characteristics of a spider. It is then followed by several analytical explanations of how drawings build children’s understandings. Not only are the introduced strategies useful for one-on-one interactive communication, but also applicable to a small group of young children. The article ends with the specifics of how these strategies were applied to a group of four children in their acquisition of the science concept of the water cycle.     

College Students’ Views on Drug Policy in the United States: The Impact of Reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow

Using a quasi-experimental research design to test the “Marshall Hypothesis,” we investigated the effects of reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration and the Age of Colorblindness on college students’ views of drug policy in the United States. One hundred and twenty-eight undergraduate students at a predominantly white Midwest university took part in this study. Test subjects read the text and took both a pre- and posttest questionnaire, while a control group of students, who did not read the book, was also surveyed concerning their views on drug policies. Additionally, reflective essays written by the test population were also analyzed. Findings offer limited support for the Marshall Hypothesis, which asserts that a properly informed constituency would conclude that certain policies in the U.S. are unjust. Students, in general, showed significant changes in their perceptions of drug policies after reading the text. However, disaggregating students by gender showed that female students, more than male students, are more convinced by Alexander’s arguments that current drug policy unfairly target communities of color.