Developing Greek Primary School Students’ Critical Thinking through an Approach of Teaching Science which Incorporates Aspects of History of Science

In this paper, the development of sixth grade students’ critical thinking skills in science courses is discussed relatively to the contribution of the integration of aspects of History of Science into instruction. Towards this direction a project on electromagnetism was designed and implemented aiming to engage primary school students in a critical examination of knowledge (importance, complexity and human implications) by generating argumentation and discussion in their classrooms. The “Test of Everyday Reasoning (TER)”, which targets the core critical thinking skills identified in “The Delphi Report” consensus, was translated and standardized for the Greek population in order to be used for the project’s assessment. A pre-post analysis was conducted for the experimental group and the control group. The encouraging results regarding critical thinking skills development are supportive to the integration of aspects of History of Science in science courses.     

Exploring students’ strategies in area conservation geometrical tasks

The aim of this study is to investigate the strategies employed by advanced high school and university students working on six tasks concerning comparison and conservation of area. Special care has been taken in the test design so that the problems could be dealt with using a variety of solution methods. Written responses and in-depth interviews with 21 12th graders and university students of mathematics provided the empirical data. The results show that the majority of the participants either did not prefer or had difficulties employing adequately formal reasoning. Visualization factors seem to exert considerable influence. Moreover, many students confuse congruence with area equivalence.     

History of Science and Instructional Design: The Case of Electromagnetism

Science &; Education - This paper deals with two main research questions: a) Can we search for pupils' potential alternative ideas in the history of science and especially in those areas...     

篮球赛中不同进攻阶段对进攻效果的影响

理论运用实践是体育科学的主要目的。体育科研人员必须将其研究信息成果,及时传递蛤教练及运动员,使他们在实践中加以应用。本研究针对1999年在法国举行的欧洲篮球冠军赛,通过对20场比赛的录像解析,力图分析不同进攻阶段对进攻产生的影响。所有数据的统计及处理,均利用一计算机篮球软件(BasketballAnalysisSystem)来处理。研究结果表明,在不同的进攻阶段内,进攻次数、投篮命中率、助攻等方面存在着差异。     

Morphology of the deltoid muscles in elite tennis players

The aim of this study was to examine the deltoid muscle properties of the dominant and non-dominant arm of Greek professional male tennis players. Eight male tennis players (mean age 22.0 years, s = 3.2) were subjected to biopsy of the deltoid muscle of both arms. Adenosine triphosphate (ATPase) histochemistry and myosin heavy chain (MHC) composition were performed on the samples with homogenate electrophoresis. No significant differences were observed in the percentage of types I, IIa, IIab, and IIb muscle fibres between the deltoid muscles of the two arms. Types I, IIa, and IIx muscle fibres of the dominant and non-dominant deltoid muscles did not differ significantly for MHC isoform composition. Type IIab muscle fibres showed a similar cross-sectional area (CSA) percentage distribution between the two arms. The CSA percentage for types I, IIa, and IIb muscle fibers did not differ significantly between the dominant and the non-dominant arm. We conclude therefore that regular tennis training probably does not lead to any significant changes in the muscle fibre types of the dominant and non-dominant arms of elite tennis players.     

Drama activities as ideational resources for primary‐grade children in urban science classrooms

In this study we explored how dramatic enactments of scientific phenomena and concepts mediate children's learning of scientific meanings along material, social, and representational dimensions. These drama activities were part of two integrated science‐literacy units, Matter and Forest, which we developed and implemented in six urban primary‐school (grades 1st–3rd) classrooms. We examine and discuss the possibilities and challenges that arise as children and teachers engaged in scientific knowing through such experiences. We use Halliday's (1978. Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press) three metafunctions of communicative activity—ideational, interpersonal, and textual—to map out the place of the multimodal drama genre in elementary urban school science classrooms of young children. As the children talked, moved, gestured, and positioned themselves in space, they constructed and shared meanings with their peers and their teachers as they enacted their roles. Through their bodies they negotiated ambiguity and re‐articulated understandings, thus marking this embodied meaning making as a powerful way to engage with science. Furthermore, children's whole bodies became central, explicit tools used to accomplish the goal of representing this imaginary scientific world, as their teachers helped them differentiate it from the real world of the model they were enacting. Their bodies operated on multiple mediated levels: as material objects that moved through space, as social objects that negotiated classroom relationships and rules, and as metaphorical entities that stood for water molecules in different states of matter or for plants, animals, or non‐living entities in a forest food web. Children simultaneously negotiated meanings across all of these levels, and in doing so, acted out improvisational drama as they thought and talked science. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 302–325, 2010     

Supplementing Accelerated Reading with classwide interdependent group‐oriented contingencies

An across‐groups (classrooms), multiple‐baseline design was used to investigate the effects of an interdependent group‐oriented contingency on the Accelerated Reader (AR) performance of fourth‐grade students. A total of 32 students in three classes participated. Before the study began, an independent group‐oriented reward program was being applied (i.e., a student received access to a tangible reward after passing each AR comprehension test). This program was supplemented with an interdependent group‐oriented contingency, and results showed that the number of quizzes passed per week increased immediately after the intervention was applied; however, this increase was not maintained. When students were divided into ability groups based on their average baseline performance, the lowest performing students exhibited a statistically significant increase in quiz performance (i.e., quizzes taken, quizzes passed, and book level), but no significant changes were found in the average and high performing groups. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Teaching Physics to In-Service Primary School Teachers in the Context of the History of Science: The Case of Falling Bodies

Our paper presents an in-service primary school teachers’ training program which is based on the idea that the history of science can play a vital role in promoting the learning of physics. This training program has been developed in the context of Comenius 2.1 which is a European Union program. This program that we have developed in the University of Athens is based on socioconstructivist and sociocultural learning principles with the intention of helping teachers to appropriate the basic knowledge on the issue of falling bodies. Moreover, it has the aim to make explicit through the exploitation of authentic historical science events, on the above topic (Aristotle’s, Galileo’s and Newton’s theories on falling bodies) the Nature of Science (NoS), the Nature of Learning (NoL) and the Nature of Teaching (NoT). During the implementation of the program we have used a variety of teaching strategies (e.g. group work, making of posters, making of concept maps, simulations) that utilize historical scientific materials on the issue of falling bodies.

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Incorporating Poeticality into the Teaching of Physics

This study examines how focusing on the notion of ‘poeticality’ (poetical forms) can provide functional insights with respect to the narrativeness of physics teaching. From this perspective, through both a meaning-making and aesthetic approach, this article explores how vehicles such as verse and rhetorical figures—metaphor, irony, litotes, hyperbole, antithesis and paradox—can create written and oral texts for the teaching of physics, using a language with poetic significance. This standpoint exists in parallel with an increasingly acknowledged fact in the field of science education, i.e., that the context and particularly the modes of representation potentially affect students’ comprehension. In this way, science education is allowed to escape the dominance of the cognitive paradigm and to concentrate on the study of students’ conceptualisations in relation to the modalities used to shape meanings.     

The objectification of the right-angled triangle in the teaching of the Pythagorean Theorem: an empirical investigation

In this paper, we present the design and the results of a teaching experiment carried out to investigate the hypothesis that it is feasible to facilitate the students’ possibility for experiencing the reactivation of the objectification of the right-angled triangle. For this purpose, a teaching design of the Pythagorean Theorem was developed and taught to an experimental class of 14-year old students. The results of our teaching were compared with a control class with the employment of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The quantitative and qualitative analyses supported our hypothesis that the students of the experimental class would develop qualitatively different understandings of the theorem than the control class, thus suggesting their possibility for experiencing the reactivation of the objectification of the right-angled triangle.