First-year tertiary students' understandings of iron filing patterns around a magnet

This paper describes responses from 28 first-year university physics students to one question of a written test which was followed up by an interview. The study has two main research aims. Firstly, it characterises the conceptual structures of students regarding the phenomenon in question. As well as being interesting in their own right, these student understandings cast light on some broader issues regarding understanding of field representations. While students' understandings of circuit electricity are well described in the existing science education literature, their understandings of field phenomena are not. Secondly, it throws light on theoretical questions about the SOLO Taxonomy, which is the framework used to study the students' conceptual structures. Of particular interest is the nature of student thinking that marks transition from the Concrete Symbolic to the Formal SOLO mode in this area. Specializations: physics education, electricity and magnetism, conceptual structures, SOLO Taxonomy. Specializations: SOLO Taxonomy, conceptual structures, mathematics education.     

QuickSmart: a basic academic skills intervention for middle school students with learning difficulties

QuickSmart is a basic academic skills intervention designed for persistently low-achieving students in the middle years of schooling that aims to improve the automaticity of basic skills to improve higher-order processes, such as problem solving and comprehension, as measured on standardized tests. The QuickSmart instructional program consists of three structured, teacher- or teacher aide-directed, 30-minute, small-group lessons each week for approximately 26 weeks. In this study, 42 middle school students experiencing learning difficulties (LD) completed the QuickSmart reading program, and a further 42 students with LD took part in the QuickSmart mathematics program. To investigate the effects of the intervention, comparisons were made between the reading and mathematics progress of the intervention group and a group of 10 high-achieving and 10 average-achieving peers. The results indicated that although the standardized reading comprehension and mathematics scores of QuickSmart students remained below those of comparison students, they improved significantly from pretest to posttest. In contrast, the standardized scores of comparison students were not significantly different from pretest to posttest. On measures of response speed and accuracy gathered using the Cognitive Aptitude Assessment System (CAAS), QuickSmart students were able to narrow the gap between their performance and that of their high- and average-achieving peers. Implications are drawn regarding the importance of interventions that emphasize the automaticity of basic academic skills for students with learning difficulties.     

Students' understanding of concepts related to plant growth

This paper reports on an investigation into students' understanding of the concept of plant growth. There are three aspects to the research. First, responses of Australian primary students to questions concerning plant growth are compared with those identified in British research (Russell & Watt, 1990). Second, the answers of secondary students, Year 7-Year 12, to questions concerning plant growth were analysed and common categories of responses were identified. Finally, the response categories were considered within the framework offered by the SOLO Taxonomy of Biggs and Collis (1982, 1991). In particular, interest was focused on whether the findings of an earlier study (Levins, 1992) in which cycles of development in the understandings of the concept of evaporation were established, might be observed in the concept of plant growth. Specializations secondary science curriculum, biology and chemistry teacher education. Specializations secondary mathematics curriculum topics, the SOLO Taxonomy, student cognitive growth.     

Elementary Pre-service Teachers’ Search,Evaluation, and Selection of Online Science Education Resources

Journal of Science Education and Technology - With the ever-growing pervasiveness of the Internet, teachers’ use of Web-based resources is increasing. Although much is now known about...     

Assessment Practices: Empowering Mathematics and Science Teachers in Rural Secondary Schools to Enhance Student Learning

Aligned with recent changes to syllabuses in Australia is an assessment regime requiring teachers to identify what their students ‘know’ and ‘can do’ in terms of the quality of understanding demonstrated. This paper describes the experiences of 25 secondary science and mathematics teachers in rural schools in New South Wales as they explore the changing nature of assessment and its implications on their classroom practice. To help reconceptualise these changes, teachers were introduced to a cognitive structural model as a theoretical framework. Throughout the 2-year study, teachers attended a series of professional development sessions and received ongoing consultative support. Each session was taped and transcribed while interviews were conducted with each teacher at the end of both years. Analysis of these data using a grounded theory approach identified seven major components of teacher practice impacted by the study. The core component was questioning while the six contributing components were teachers’ pedagogical practices, attention to cognition, teaching strategies, assessment linked to pedagogy, classroom advantages for students, and classroom advantages for teachers. These findings represent a major shift in teachers’ perceptions of assessment from a focus on the accumulation of students’ marks to one of diagnosis as a means of directing teaching to enhance students’ scientific and mathematical understandings.     

Case analysis of children's reasoning in problem-solving process

Recognising critical reasoning and problem-solving as one of the key skills for twenty-first century citizenship, various types of problem contexts have been practiced in science classrooms to enhance students’ understandings and use of evidence-based thinking and justification. Good problems need to allow students to adapt and evaluate the effectiveness of their knowledge, reasoning and problem-solving strategies. When students are engaged in complex and open-ended problem tasks, it is assumed their reasoning and problem-solving paths become complex with creativity and evidence in order to justify their conclusion and solutions. This study investigated the levels of reasoning evident in student discourse when engaging in different types of problem-solving tasks and the role of teacher interactions on students’ reasoning. Fifteen students and a classroom teacher in a Grade 5–6 classroom participated in this study. Through case analyses, the study findings suggest that (a) there was no clear co-relation between certain structures of problem tasks and the level of reasoning in students’ problem-solving discourse, (b) students exhibited more data-based reasoning than evidence-based and rule-based justification in experiment-based problem-solving tasks, and (c) teacher intervention supported higher levels of student reasoning. Pedagogical reflections on the difficulties of constructing effective problem-solving tasks and the need for developing teacher scaffolding strategies are discussed.     

First‐year Biology Students’ Understandings of Meiosis: An investigation using a structural theoretical framework

Meiosis is a biological concept that is both complex and important for students to learn. This study aims to explore first‐year biology students’ explanations of the process of meiosis, using an explicit theoretical framework provided by the Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO) model. The research was based on responses of 334 first‐year biology students to practical and examination questions about meiosis, together with student interviews. Students’ written responses were coded, which resulted in a hierarchy of qualitatively different categories consistent with recent developments in the SOLO model. Most responses described a number of the less abstract elements of meiosis, but not in a coherent, relational manner, and interviews elucidated several areas of confusion about meiosis and its subordinate concepts. These findings are consistent with much previous research, and provide insights into both the use of the SOLO model as a research tool and students’ understandings of meiosis. In conjunction with previous research, the results of this study raise questions beyond its local context about the match between students’ apparent understandings and university expectations. The implications of the study relate to the use of terminology, the treatment of meiosis in textbooks, and some specific issues of pedagogy.