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The thoughts that teachers have about the content and students they are to teach influences the way in which they will teach. This article briefly discusses the literature on teacher thinking with particular reference to recent work in science education to provide a framework in which to situate the research. The article describes the interview task and the method of analysis for obtaining representations of teachers' conceptions of teaching science that were used in this study. A detailed summary based on an analysis of the conceptions of teaching science held by six experienced high school science teachers is presented. Several features of teachers' conceptions that have emerged from the analysis are discussed. (PR)

Even without relying on individual student testing there is a great deal that teachers can know about student learning in their classrooms. The purpose of this article is to ask: As a means of identifying student learning, what alternatives to testing exist within normal classroom practices? First the context of the work reported here is described in order to explain the impetus for the question asked. An analysis of the different kinds of things that can provide information on student learning in normal classrooms is presented. The analysis is illustrated with two examples drawn from Project DISTIL which is a study of experienced high school science teachers. The conclusions to the above question are summarized. (PR)

Knowledge-in-action is a teacher's form of inherently knowing one's actions in the context of daily teaching activities. This article focuses on one physics teacher in a study and describes and analyzes his knowledge-in-action. Observations and interviews were used as data. Among the findings are the teacher's practice can be delineated into two modes, a classroom mode and a laboratory mode. Students in the classroom mode are expected to mentally reason as they are guided by the teacher. In the laboratory mode, the teacher did not hand out detailed instructions for performing labs as he expects students to develop procedures for themselves. The teacher treats Newton's laws of motion as unquestionable givens. (PR)

This paper presents a case study involving a small group of students enrolled in a tutorial program learning introductory college chemistry. The underlying theoretical framework of this investigation was a constructivist view of learning, but more specifically it was based on Ausubel's theory of meaningful learning. The findings of this investigation were: (1) students did undergo qualitative changes in their knowledge, but some students more so than others; (2) these changes were related to the students' learning approach, i.e., positively related to the adoption of a meaningful learning set (a predisposition to learn meaningfully); and to the nature (quality and quantity) of their prior knowledge; and (3) evidence suggested that at least one of the subjects changed from essentially a rote learner to a more meaningful learner. In addition, this study explored Ausubel's condition of adopting a meaningful learning set for meaningful learning to occur. (CW)