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One of the most important, albeit ignored, issues in the process of curriculum implementation is teachers' beliefs; indeed, this is a vital issue since their beliefs about teaching and learning will in part govern their actions in the classroom. There is a substantial body of the literature that highlights how teachers' beliefs are important when ensuring that science education reforms are successfully carried out. Therefore, it is important to explore the beliefs of teachers and teacher candidates to support them in adapting these beliefs to be in accord with the goals of the reform. This paper presents the results of an investigation into the nature of preservice science teachers' (PSTs) beliefs about teaching, the congruency of their beliefs about teaching, their actual classroom practices, and the potential role of their early experiences as learners in shaping their beliefs and classroom practices. At the outset of the study, there were 13 PSTs. Among them, four were recruited for the study by purposive sampling. They were all in the final year of their 4-year teacher education programme and will be able to teach middle school science classes after graduation. This study employed a basic qualitative research method. The primary methods of data collection in this study were: 1) initial interviews to select participants in a purposeful manner; 2) classroom observation of each PST to identify how they taught science; and 3) final interviews with each PST to explore their beliefs about science teaching and their past experiences. We found that the PSTs who chose to participate in this study hold student-centred teaching beliefs while performing teacher-centred science teaching practices. The result was interesting in that the PSTs' teaching practices closely resemble those of their early science teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finland and Singapore are both top-performing countries in international assessments such as PISA. Finland has been consistently one of the high-achievers regarding not only students' literacy levels but also educational equity. Similarly, Singapore has continuously shown outstanding performance in PISA. It outperformed all the other participants in all three literacy domains in PISA 2015. We believe exploring the factors affecting students' science literacy in these two top-performing countries will provide the low-performing countries with a useful guideline. In this regard, we aim to build models including the student and school-level factors associated with the students' science literacy in Finland and Singapore using PISA 2015 data. We conduct Hierarchical Linear Modeling to create these models. The sample includes 5882 students in Finland and 6115 students in Singapore. The resulting models explain about 43% and 40% of the within-school variance while they explain 62% and 71% of the between-school variance in science literacy in Finland and Singapore respectively. At the student level, students' enjoyment and interest in science are the most influential predictors of science literacy while at the school level, schools' economic, social, and cultural status is by far the most powerful predictor of science literacy in both Finland and Singapore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, an analogy has been developed to teach students electric circuits in a more concrete way. A connection between the elements of electric circuits and the characters in the Little Red Riding Hood story has been established to teach how simple electric circuits work. In addition to the similarities in the story, we have indicated where the analogy between the analogue concept (Little Red Riding Hood) and the target concept (simple electric circuits) breaks down, and suggested several ways to address any misconceptions that might arise during the implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]