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The purpose of this study is to uncover and understand the factors that affect secondary science and mathematics teachers' initial implementation of Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA), a pedagogy developed for teaching with classroom response system (CRS) technology. We sought to identify the most common and strongest factors, and to understand the general process of how teachers adopt TEFA. We identified ten main hindering factors reported by teachers, and found that time limitations and question development difficulties are reported as the most problematic. In this paper we provide five vignettes of teachers' initial implementation experiences, illustrating different courses that TEFA adoption can follow. We classify our ten factors into four groups: contextual factors that directly hinder teachers' attempts to implement TEFA (extrinsic type I); circumstances that affect teachers' teaching in general (extrinsic type 0); gaps that teachers have in the knowledge and skills they need to adopt TEFA (intrinsic type I); and ways of being a teacher that describe teachers' deeper perspectives and beliefs, which may be consonant or dissonant with TEFA (intrinsic type II). Finally, we identify four general categories that describe the teachers' initial TEFA implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's out-of-school learning is dominated by PC games, videos, and TV. These media provide children with optimal conditions for nurturing their visuospatial intelligence. In chemistry and biochemistry, over the past 125 years, thinking has shifted from the logical–mathematical to the logical–visuospatial. In chemistry visuospatial thinking has never been so dominant as today. Thus in chemistry, a truly international, pictorial language has evolved. Yet, the founding and growth of chemical education as a separate discipline has resulted, albeit unintended, in an alienation of chemistry educators from these dramatic changes in chemistry. By confining themselves in their teaching of chemistry to the logical–mathematical and the verbal, teachers and chemical educators are conveying a false and abandoned conception of chemistry in the class rooms. And, they fail to address the most important developed intelligence of our young. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]