‘Hard’ decisions and ‘tough’ choices: the business approach to university decline

This paper critically examines the solutions to university decline that emphasize selective cutbacks, in which certain areas are phased out to protect others. The experiences of two Canadian universities show that these kinds of hard decisions generate a considerable amount of political conflict. While the business perspective recommends decisive action, it provides little advice about how these actions can be implemented. It may even intensify conflict and worsen an already difficult situation. The paper argues that we need to learn about the management of both conflict and collegiality, as well as the conditions which make tough choices necessary, before we can successfully tackle decline.     

Secondary School Students’ Reasoning About Science and Personhood

Science & Education - Scientific advances, particularly in evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, present many challenges to religious and popular notions of...     

Teachers’ Understanding and Operationalisation of ‘Science Capital’

Across the globe, governments, industry and educationalists are in agreement that more needs to be done to increase and broaden participation in post-16 science. Schools, as well as teachers, are seen as key in this effort. Previous research has found that engagement with science, inclination to study science and understanding of the value of science strongly relates to a student's science capital. This paper reports on findings from the pilot year of a one-year professional development (PD) programme designed to work with secondary-school teachers to build students’ science capital. The PD programme introduced teachers to the nature and importance of science capital and thereafter supported them to develop ways of implementing science capital-building pedagogy in their practice. The data comprise interviews with the participating teachers (n?=?10), observations of classroom practices and analyses of the teachers’ accounts of their practice. Our findings suggest that teachers found the concept of science capital to be compelling and to resonate with their own intuitive understandings and experiences. However, the ways in which the concept was operationalised in terms of the implementation of pedagogical practices varied. The difficulties inherent in the operationalisation are examined and recommendations for future work with teachers around the concept of science capital are developed.     

Science on the Web: Secondary School Students’ Navigation Patterns and Preferred Pages’ Characteristics

This study aims to explore navigation patterns and preferred pages’ characteristics of ten secondary school students’ searching the web for information about cloning. The students navigated the Web for as long as they wished in a context of minimum support of teaching staff. Their navigation patterns were analyzed using audit trail data software. The characteristics of their preferred Web pages were also analyzed using a scheme of analysis largely based on socio-linguistics and socio-semiotics approaches. Two distinct groups of students could be discerned. The first consisted of more competent students, who during their navigation visited fewer relevant pages, however of higher credibility and more specialized content. The second group consists of weaker students, who visited more pages, mainly of lower credibility and rather popularized content. Implications for designing educational web pages and teaching are discussed.     

Middle School Students’ Science Self-Efficacy and Its Sources: Examination of Gender Difference

The main purpose of the present study is to investigate middle school students?? science self-efficacy as well as its sources and outcomes as a function of gender. Bandura??s hypothesized sources of self-efficacy (i.e., mastery experience, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and emotional arousal) in addition to being inviting with self and inviting with others were examined as sources of self-efficacy, while cognitive and metacognitive strategy use was examined as an outcome of self-efficacy. A total of 1,932 students participated in the study and were administered self-report instruments. Results showed that the relationship between science self-efficacy and its proposed sources does not change as a function of gender. All proposed sources, except for vicarious experience, were found to be significantly related to students?? scientific self-efficacy. Moreover, girls were found to experience significantly more emotional arousal and to send positive messages to others more than boys. On the other hand, no gender difference was found concerning science self-efficacy and strategy use. The findings also revealed a positive association between science self-efficacy and strategy use. Overall, findings supported Bandura??s conception of self-efficacy and suggested invitations as additional sources of self-efficacy.     

Secondary School Students’ Understanding of Science and Their Socioscientific Reasoning

Research in socioscientific issue (SSI)-based interventions is relatively new (Sadler in Journal of Research in Science Teaching 41:513–536, 2004; Zeidler et al. in Journal of Research in Science Teaching 46:74–101, 2009), and there is a need for understanding more about the effects of SSI-based learning environments (Sadler in Journal of Research in Science Teaching 41:513–536, 2004). Lee and Witz (International Journal of Science Education 31:931–960, 2009) highlighted the need for detailed case studies that would focus on how students respond to teachers’ practices of teaching SSI. This study presents case studies that investigated the development of secondary school students’ science understanding and their socioscientific reasoning within SSI-based learning environments. A multiple case study with embedded units of analysis was implemented for this research because of the contextual differences for each case. The findings of the study revealed that students’ understanding of science, including scientific method, social and cultural influences on science, and scientific bias, was strongly influenced by their experiences in SSI-based learning environments. Furthermore, multidimensional SSI-based science classes resulted in students having multiple reasoning modes, such as ethical and economic reasoning, compared to data-driven SSI-based science classes. In addition to portraying how participants presented complexity, perspectives, inquiry, and skepticism as aspects of socioscientific reasoning (Sadler et al. in Research in Science Education 37:371–391, 2007), this study proposes the inclusion of three additional aspects for the socioscientific reasoning theoretical construct: (1) identification of social domains affecting the SSI, (2) using cost and benefit analysis for evaluation of claims, and (3) understanding that SSIs and scientific studies around them are context-bound.     

Knowing and Learning about Science in Primary School ‘Communities of Science Practice’: The Views of Participating Scientists in the MyScience Initiative

MyScience is a primary science education initiative in which being in a community of practice is integral to the learning process. One component of this initiative involves professional scientists interacting with primary school communities which are navigating their way towards sustainable ‘communities of practice’ around the ‘domain’ of ‘investigating scientifically’. This paper describes the ongoing journey to date of eleven scientists (six astronomers and five engineers) who actively participated in MyScience over an extended period. Their views of interactions with teachers and students were analysed using attributes associated with both ‘communities of practice’ and the ‘nature of science’. Findings reveal new understandings about the evolving characteristics associated with the development of such school-community collaborations as well as affordances and barriers that may influence their further growth. The influence of these scientists’ own ‘community of science practices’ may account for some of the findings. Implications for science teaching and learning in primary school community of practice settings are discussed.     

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.     

Multimedia e-Learning and Self-Regulated Science Learning: a Study of Primary School Learners’ Experiences and Perceptions

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Multimedia-supported e-learning is considered useful as it can offer an enjoyable independent learning experience to learners. However, the...     

Middle School Science Teachers’ Confidence and Pedagogical Practice of New Literacies

Due to the rapid advancements of information and communication technologies (ICTs), educational researchers argue that multimodal and new literacies should become common practices in schools. As new ICTs emerge and evolve, students need the new literacies skills and practices to successfully participate fully in the civic life of a global community. Are teachers prepared to integrate ICTs in the classroom to develop students’ new literacies skills? The purpose of this study is to suggest a new literacies framework that guides ICTs integration and supports scientific inquiry, as well as investigate middle school teachers’ confidence to practice new literacies in science classrooms. The study adopted mixed-methodology design, surveyed 32 middle school science teachers’ ICTs and new literacies skills, and randomly observed 15 teachers’ new literacies practices in the classrooms. The results revealed that even though teachers have high confidence in using ICTs, the meaningful technology integration and new literacies practices were scarcely observed in their classroom practices.     

Modeling and Measuring High School Students’ Computational Thinking Practices in Science

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Despite STEM education communities recognizing the importance of integrating computational thinking (CT) into high school curricula, computation still...     

School Teachers’ Experiences of Science Curriculum Reform

We examine teachers’ experiences of a major reform of the school science curriculum for 14–16-year olds in England. This statutory reform enhances the range of available science courses and emphasises the teaching of socio-scientific issues and the nature of science, alongside the teaching of canonical science knowledge. This paper examines teachers’ experiences of the reform and the factors that condition these experiences. A designed sample of 22 teachers discussed their experiences of the reform within a semi-structured interview. Our analysis considers how the external and internal structures within which teachers work interact with the personal characteristics of teachers to condition their experiences of the curriculum reform. In many cases, personal/internal/external contexts of teachers’ work align, resulting in an overall working context that is supportive of teacher change. However, in other cases, tensions within these contexts result in barriers to change. We also explore cases in which external curriculum reform has stimulated the development of new contexts for teachers’ work. We argue that curriculum reformers need to recognise the inevitability of multiple teaching goals within a highly differentiated department and school workplace. We also show how experiences of curriculum reform can extend beyond the learning of new knowledge and associated pedagogies to involve challenges to teachers’ professional identities. We argue for the extended use of teacher role models within local communities of practice to support such ‘identity work’.     

Understanding: ‘Knowledge’, ‘Belief’ and ‘Understanding’

The following paper is intended as an exercise in friendly criticism of one of Harvey Siegel's and Mike Smith's (Knowing, Believing and Understanding, this volume). I'm in substantial sympathy with the general thrust of their paper and my remarks merely provide some criticism of their discussion's conceptual coherence and clarity and a correspondingly slightly adjusted version of what they have to say. My focus is limited to the conceptions of knowledge, belief and understanding and their inter-relationships in terms of which they offer suggestions to science educators.     

Middle School Science Teachers’ Discursive Purposes and Talk Moves in Supporting Students’ Experiments

Science & Education - The paper reports qualitative findings from a study about how science teachers enacted discursive purposes and talk moves to support the students’ experiments....     

The School and ‘Contestation'∗

(The Editors are pleased to publish this article by Monsieur Maurice Niveau, Rector of the Academy of Lille, because it raises many issues that are also topical in English education: politicization of educational problems, inability to achieve a consensus, the effects of a hierarchical administration, and the composition and powers of school governing bodies (this last was discussed in the context of the Green Paper by Mr Joslyn Owen, the Chief Education Officer for Devonshire, in an article in our last issue). The recent House of Commons Expenditure Committee report ('The Attainments of the School Leaver’, HMSO, London March 1978) recommended that we should seek more information on education elsewhere in Western Europe. The publication of this paper is one small contribution to greater knowledge in this area. The paper was first published in French in the Revue de la Défense Nationale, Paris, July 1977.

Monsieur Niveau, as Rector of Lille, is nominal head of all educational institutions, including universities, in one of the largest and most densely populated ‘académies’ (educational administrative divisions) in France. He is no stranger to Britain and was one of the OECD ‘examiners’ who reported to that organization on the state of English education and which criticized the alleged secrecy of the DES. (cf. Reviews of National Policies for Education, England, OECD Paris 1977.))