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The aim of this study was to develop an instrument to measure upper-level Chinese elementary students’ attitudes towards science by addressing problems with existing ones, as highlighted in the lit...

Crosscutting concepts (CCCs) are superordinate in the scientific concept system, common across disciplines, and very abstract. These characteristics, with the addition of incoherence in their curricular presentation, can challenge instructors. We designed a modular course based on coherence and conceptual understanding. The course structure was arranged in accordance with intra- and inter-unit coherence of CCCs, and each lesson was prepared according to “concept-based instruction” and the “5E instructional model.” The results of the pretest and posttest and the semi-structured interviews consistently showed that the participating high school students significantly improved their understanding of CCCs, thus supporting the effectiveness of the modular course.

A lesson plan is a design problem for a teacher. The desired solution to this problem is to design an instructional process that can guide students in constructing an understanding of scientific concepts through their own thinking. This article demonstrates a practical approach to designing an effective lesson plan. The approach has five phases: listing the concepts in a lesson, proposing questions that can be answered by each concept, sequencing the questions according to the logic of student cognitive development, selecting resources and designing tasks to create learning situations, and applying knowledge to scientific research and real life. A meiosis lesson from a high school biology course serves as an example for understanding the solutions to problems that may arise in each phase.

Since inquiry was first introduced to science education, a lot of inquiry-based tasks have appeared in textbooks for supporting an inquiry-based approach. These tasks have great potential to direct...

Participating in effective professional development (PD) activities is crucial for helping teachers improve the quality of pedagogy and students’ learning results. Numerous factors influence the design of effective PD, one of which is duration. However, many teachers do not find much time to participate in long-term concentrated and continuous PD due to their heavy workloads. Based on this consideration, this paper presents the Workshop-Seminar-Demonstration Class PD (WSD-PD) model, which addresses the factor of duration by shortening the hours of contact, lengthening the total span of time required, and integrating elements such as active learning and expert follow-up to improve teachers’ practical teaching methods. With “Teaching for Conceptual Change” as the theme and junior high school science teachers as participants, the results of the study show that WSD-PD can serve teachers by generating willingness to improve teaching practices for and influence teaching behaviors in them. The settings of different activities in this model are also considered to play distinct and indispensable roles in the program.

This article describes the development and validation of an instrument that can be used for content analysis of inquiry-based tasks. According to the theories of educational evaluation and qualitie...

We designed a course based on inquiry learning using WISE, an online inquiry-based science environment platform, and the 5E instructional model. This article summarizes guidelines used in designing the course, analyses of student needs and school environment, setting of course objectives, modification of materials, and evaluation of student performance. A “Healthy Life” course based on those guidelines was implemented, along with a teacher-training workshop, in two schools, and pretests and posttests were administered to evaluate the achievements of the project participants. The results showed that the participants had constructed scientific concepts and improved their level of cognitive knowledge. An efficiency questionnaire and semistructured interviews demonstrated the effectiveness of the course, thus indicating that we should share the guidelines and features of the Healthy Life course with other course designers and teachers.

Students’ misconceptions of many scientific phenomena or scientific processes have been demonstrated by abundant research; however, investigations into the teachers’ misconceptions are insufficient. Despite the similarity in students’ and teachers’ misconceptions, as shown by the existing findings, a much deeper and more exhaustive study of the relationship between the two remains to be performed. This chapter will report findings of an empirical research study that examined common misconceptions about photosynthesis and respiration held by junior secondary school biology teachers and their students. The current study found the following results: some middle school biology teachers have a more or less incorrect or incomplete understanding of the key concepts in biology, teachers’ and students’ misconceptions display some similarities, these similarities are evident as statistically positive correlations, and the teachers’ misconceptions are likely to be the source of the students’ misconceptions. In conclusion, suggestions for professional training and further research are provided.

With the development and implementation of new curriculum standards, the field tests of education reform in senior high schools began in 2004 in four pilot provinces in mainland China. After five years of the reform, it is necessary to know how and to what extent the curriculum standard guides test classroom instruction. The present study was conducted with the aims of quantitatively exploring the alignments between the national High School Biology Curriculum Standard and the standards-based High School Exit Exam (HSEE) of 2009 in the four provinces, using Porter's alignment model. As a result, it was found that none of the four provinces' standardised tests of 2009 analysed were significantly aligned with the national Biology Curriculum Standard. The low alignment indexes are mainly because the four HSEEs analysed generally require lower levels of cognitive skills than that of the Standard. These results deserve universal attention by both policymakers and test developers in mainland China.