Transitions and re-engagement through second chance education

The issue of school non-completion continues to be a matter of concern for policy makers and practitioners in Australia today. Despite the efforts of governments and school systems to improve participation and retention rates, often one in three students drop out of school before completing Year 12. Major factors influence non-completion and militate against young people remaining at school. Findings from recent research indicate that some non-completers choose to re-enter education through second chance programs outside the school environment. The argument for second chance education presented in this paper is developed within the context of the ‘risk’ society and in relation to recent theories of youth transitions.     

Developing a Research Agenda in Science Education

The Science Summit reinforced a question upon which many of us in science education are focused: How can we, the science education community of researchers, practitioners, and consumers, lead policy? We include a brief review of the No Child Left Behind Act and its implications for teachers, and elaborate about one ongoing and growing effort to answer the concerns about the paucity of research expressed at the Summit. We describe a unique and growing collaboration across professional science education and science organizations and societies that focuses on the development of a research agenda. The term ‘consilience’ refers to the “jumping together of knowledge” that leads to scientific advancements, progressive, creative, fluid scientific research and intellectual capacity to move a research community toward an enlightened research agenda. A coherent research agenda enables us to specify what we know, what we need to know, and how research can be employed for creating and implementing policy. The use of a dynamic organizer (such as Pasteur’s Quadrant) for a research matrix of topics provides a possible structure for organizing and cataloging research questions, designs, findings from past studies, needed areas for research, and policy implications. Through this unique collaboration, the science education community can better focus on needs and priorities and ensure that teachers, policy makers, scientists, and researchers in education at local through national levels have an important stake in research priorities and actions.     

Mastery,insight, and the teaching of chemistry

The learning of chemistry is described as a process analogous to the process of making chemical discoveries. Historical examples are given to show how chemists have used their insight to break out of a conceptual loop in order to advance the science. Having the insight to make the intuitive leap necessary to break a conceptual loop is as important as having the mastery of the pertinent facts. As in making chemical discoveries, learning elementary chemistry requires developing insight as well as acquiring mastery of the facts. However, current general chemistry teaching tends to teach facts first and insight later. Suggestions for improving this situation so that insight and facts are learned together are given. Finally, the nature of insight is probed more deeply and presented as a two-step process where the first step is an evaluation of the perceptions about science which are held. Once the student, teacher, or researcher has a clear evaluation of the validity of the perceptions that he or she holds, further significant progress toward understanding or scientific discovery is possible.     

The science support scale: Its appropriateness with high school students

Implementing the idea that more emphasis should be placed on student achievement in the affective domain is contingent upon the concurrent development of suitable instruments for the assessment of prescribed criteria. One such instrument, the Schwirian Science Support Scale (Tri-S scale), was reported in a recent NSTA publication as a promising tool for measuring student science support. Recent research using the Tri-S scale with high school pupils showed that scores on this instrument did not increase after the students had taken a tenth grade introductory course in biology. Further analysis indicated students of teachers scoring “high” in science support did not produce higher scores on the Tri-S scale than students studying biology from teachers “low” in science support. Reliability estimates using high school student scores were well below previous estimates using scores from college undergraduates. Factor analysis of inter-item correlations indicated that student interpretation of item meaning did not correspond to the five subtest structure of the Tri-S scale. Findings from this study demonstrate that the Tri-S scale is not an appropriate instrument for measuring attitudinal changes of tenth grade high school students. This study is suggestive of the fact that went and future instruments that purport to measure achievement in noncognitive areas should be carefully analyzed before they are recommended for use with specific populations.