The Design of Writing: Unfolding systems of meaning

This article explores the findings of a small research study that asked writers to describe a meaningful, personal incident using first narrative and then poetic forms. The poetry raised many anxieties about writing, including the revelations of subjectivity and the risks in sharing such work with a group. To understand some of the complexities of these responses, the researchers thought of writing as an ecology with interdependent systems influencing the writing. Rereading the research texts, they traced some of those systems that affect students' writing and understanding of poetry.     

Students' reasoning about chemical bonding: The lacuna of repulsion

This article concerns a lacuna in chemistry students' reasoning about chemical bonding. Although chemistry students are familiar with the charges that make up the atom––both positive and negative––they refer only to the attraction between unlike charges. Specifically, they ignore the repulsion between the positive nuclei. We named this disregard of repulsion the lacuna of repulsion. Repulsion is a crucial component in the force-based explanation of chemical bonding, presenting the bond as a dynamic equilibrium between attraction and repulsion electrical forces. We noticed this lacuna incidentally while interviewing chemistry students for a bigger project aimed at supporting students in understanding the force-based explanation of chemical bonding. This article describes our systematic qualitative study of the lacuna of repulsion and its impact on mental models of 23 high school chemistry students. Our findings show that students use six mental models, most of them built upon each other. Beginning from a simple mental model that describes the chemical bond as electrons, continuing with the including attraction forces, and completing with repulsion and a dynamic view of the bond. Only when one considers both attraction and repulsion forces and understands the dynamic balance between them is it possible to build the force-based dynamic mental model of chemical bonding.     

Does STES‐Oriented Science Education Promote 10th‐Grade Students’ Decision‐Making Capability?

Today’s society is continuously coping with sustainability‐related complex issues in the Science‐Technology‐Environment‐Society (STES) interfaces. In those contexts, the need and relevance of the development of students’ higher‐order cognitive skills (HOCS) such as question‐asking, critical‐thinking, problem‐solving and decision‐making capabilities within science teaching have been argued by several science educators for decades. Three main objectives guided this study: (1) to establish “base lines” for HOCS capabilities of 10th grade students (n = 264) in the Israeli educational system; (2) to delineate within this population, two different groups with respect to their decision‐making capability, science‐oriented (n = 142) and non‐science (n = 122) students, Groups A and B, respectively; and (3) to assess the pre‐post development/change of students’ decision‐making capabilities via STES‐oriented HOCS‐promoting curricular modules entitled Science, Technology and Environment in Modern Society (STEMS). A specially developed and validated decision‐making questionnaire was used for obtaining a research‐based response to the guiding research questions. Our findings suggest that a long‐term persistent application of purposed decision‐making, promoting teaching strategies, is needed in order to succeed in affecting, positively, high‐school students’ decision‐making ability. The need for science teachers’ involvement in the development of their students’ HOCS capabilities is thus apparent.     

The ‘Strange Alteration’ of Hamlet: Comic Books,Adaptation and Constructions of Adolescent literacy

This article examines two comic book adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet produced for teenage readers and used in school classrooms. It seeks to understand the ways in which particular kinds of literacy are being implied and constructed through the textual practice of multimodal adaptation. It presents a close reading of sections of the texts and places them within the framework of multimodal theory and adaptation studies. The paper is part of a larger study of comic book adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays based on a series of semi-structured interviews with the producers (publishers, artists, textual editors) involved in the adaptation process. The data are analysed in order to raise questions concerning the assumptions about literacy inherent in educational texts, and to outline the importance of further qualitative research in the area.     

Working Together: Integrating Computational Modeling Approaches to Investigate Complex Phenomena

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Complex systems are made up of many entities, whose interactions emerge into distinct collective patterns. Computational modeling platforms can provide...     

Writing creatively in a museum: tracing lines through persons,art objects and texts

Creative writing is often thought of as an individual and solitary pursuit. This is partly owing to Romantic (and still popular) notions of creativity as residing in highly gifted individuals, but also to the widely held belief that writing is a lonely rather than a social activity. The research presented in this paper provides a unique insight into the creative process by tracing the way one poem is produced by a member of a creative writing class based on a major urban art gallery. Based on a 5‐year ethnographic study of this class, it employs interview material, field notes, photographs and creative writing as data. Using theories from both the “anthropology of writing” (Barton and Papen, 2010 ; Latour and Woolgar, 1986 ) and the “anthropology of creativity” (Ingold, 2007 ; Hallam and Ingold, 2007 ), I argue that creative writing is a relational and temporal process involving complex and multiple claims for agency. I also go on to show that when the text moves from a private to a public context, these multiple agencies are encompassed and erased under the umbrella of individual authorship.