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This qualitative case study employed an existing framework (Chin, 2006) to examine teacher questioning strategies that promote students' higher-order thinking in science. The study explored the instruction of an experienced science teacher and a 10th grade Chemistry class that he taught in a Singapore school. Our methods included lesson observations, questionnaire and interviews. We found that the teacher frequently applied non-evaluative follow-up moves and supportive follow-up moves to student responses in episodes that students appeared to engage in science thinking through classroom talk. Non-evaluative follow-up moves included "withhold evaluations," "restatements" and "reformulations." Supportive follow-up moves were "prompts" that required students to elaborate or clarify their answers and to justify reasoning. Interview findings further suggested that the teacher prompts helped students to build on their science ideas and engaged them in thinking reflectively. We discussed implications for classroom practice to help teachers work towards the goal of nurturing lifelong learners.

Students learn more than science knowledge in a science classroom; they also acquire important messages about the purposes and contexts of science. Roberts (2011) calls these messages a companion story. In this article, we present a case study of high-profile Australian contemporary scientists to argue that there is a need to broaden the range of companion stories presented to students. A key companion story presently conveyed in schools is that the products of science are more important than the involvement of scientists in the construction of scientific knowledge. By contrast, the experiences and insights of the scientists in this case study shifts our understanding away from the idea that science is something that humans do--although that is true--to a deeper understanding that science is a discipline in which being human is important. We identify fresh companion stories that arise from these data and argue that the inclusion of such companion stories in the science curriculum is likely to better meet the needs of all citizens, scientists and non-scientists alike.

We report on findings from a qualitative study of Australian scientists whose work brings them into contact with the public. This research sought to understand how a school science curriculum could better represent the work of scientists today. We discuss the views expressed by our participant scientists about the importance of openness and open-mindedness in their work, including their engagement with the public. They described openness as an important characteristic of science. Our participants also see open-mindedness on the part of both scientists and members of the public as important for productive relationships. They see the development of such relationships as an essential facet of their work. The views expressed by these scientists provide a provocative insight into the ways in which contemporary scientists see their work and relationships with their communities. Their perspectives have important implications for approaches to teaching science in schools.

The amount of substance and its unit the mole is a basic concept in chemistry. However, previous research has shown that teaching and learning the concept are challenging tasks for both teachers and students. The purpose of this study was to pinpoint the problems which emerge in the teaching and learning process, and provide integrated suggestions for classroom instruction. By means of videotaping and interviews, the case studies explored how the mole is presented and conceptualized in two secondary classrooms in two different countries, Australia and Taiwan. Data analysis was based on a concept map and focused on how two key ideas were presented in the lessons and perceived by the students: (1) the definition of the mole, and (2) the concept of molar mass. The findings show that during the lessons on the mole, most of the time was spent on solving stoichiometric problems. Conceptually, the number aspect of the mole, that is, Avogadro's number, was emphasized; the concept of molar mass was introduced without meaningfully connecting it to the concept of relative atomic/molecular mass. Although the students were able to solve relevant problems, they could not coherently explain the relations among the concepts. Two critical components for a conceptual understanding of the mole emerged: (1) the number aspect of the mole needs to be justified by its mass aspect, and (2) the connection between molar mass and relative atomic/molecular mass needs to be explicitly explained. The two components provide one explanation for students' algorithmic learning and their confusion in learning about the mole, and serve as concrete suggestions for improving classroom instruction. The study once again manifested the significance of teaching for conceptual understanding in science education. It also exemplifies how a concept map of a specific scientific concept can also be a useful analytical tool in educational research.

This article presents a case study of 10 high-profile Australian research scientists. These scientists are highly committed to engaging with the public. They interact with a wide range of groups in the community, including the traditional media. They are aware that they are seen as representatives of science at a time when the authority of science and scientists is threatened in Australia by controversy around issues such as climate change and vaccination. Through their experiences of interacting with non-scientists, they have developed views about qualities, characteristics and knowledge that contribute to, or inhibit, positive interactions between scientists and non-scientists. Their experiences and insights highlight aspects of contemporary science that are not generally acknowledged in science curricula.

This article presents a case study of four academic scientists. These academics teach in the first year of a Bachelor of Science degree at a large research-focused Australian university that has demanded and supported a greater focus on undergraduate learning. Taken as a whole, the accounts of science that the first-year academics in this case study gave, and which they are presenting to their students, challenge the images of science and scientists typically presented in school science curricula. Using Roberts' heuristic of Vision 1 and Vision 2 for the broad purposes of learning science, we consider various accounts given of science by these academic scientists and consider how science might appear to a student who takes all four of their subjects.

This study examines how a class of Grade 7 students employed linguistic resources to explain density differences. Drawing from the same data-set as a previous study by, we take a language perspective to investigate the challenges students face in learning the concept of density. Our study thus complements previous research on learning about density which has mostly focussed on the conceptual challenges. The data consist of transcripts of lessons on density and students' written assignments. Using selected analytical categories from the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework, we first examined students' use of linguistic resources in their written reports of a practical activity. We then compared the language employed by the students with the instructional language, identifying possible links. Our analysis identified specific aspects of language that the students need to appropriate in order to express an understanding of density that aligns with a scientific perspective. The findings from this study illuminate ways by which teachers could assist students in overcoming the linguistic challenges in explaining density differences, which complement those made by existing studies that focus on conceptual challenges.

The "mole" is a fundamental concept in quantitative chemistry, yet research has shown that the mole is one of the most perplexing concepts in the teaching and learning of chemistry. This paper provides a survey of the relevant literature, identifies the necessary components of a sound understanding of the mole concept, and unpacks and presents these components in the form of a concept map. The concept map incorporates the atomic-molecular concept with the mole concept, and connects the two concepts by two linking ideas: the number aspect of the SI definition (linking idea 1) and the connection between relative atomic-molecular mass and molar mass (linking idea 2). This concept map not only provides a conceptual framework for making meaning in relation to the mole but also sheds some light on how the concept might be better taught and learned.

This case study of a science lesson, on the topic thermal expansion, examines the language demands on students from an integrated science and language perspective. The data were generated during a sequence of 9 lessons on the topic of "States of Matter" in a Grade 7 classroom (12-13 years old students). We identify the language demands by comparing students' writings with the scientific account of expansion that the teacher intended the students to learn. The comparison involved both content analysis and lexicogrammatical (LG) analysis. The framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics was adopted for the LG analysis. Our analysis reveals differences in the meaning and the way LG resources were employed between the students' writings and the scientific account. From these differences, we found the notion of condition-of-use for LG resources to be a significant aspect of the language that students need to appropriate in order to employ the language of school science appropriately. This notion potentially provides a means by which teachers could concurrently address the conceptual and representational demands of science learning. Finally, we reflect on how the complementary use of content analysis and LG analysis provides a way for integrating the science and language perspectives in order to understand the demands of learning science through language.

This study attends to the possibilities of analyzing students' writings at a lexicogrammatical level in terms of their use of linguistic resources, and the insights afforded by this approach into the challenges students faced when they employed the language of school science related to the phenomenon of expansion. For the purpose of this study, the data consist of Grade 7 students' written assignments generated from a sequence of lessons on the topic of "States of Matter." We analyzed the language by employing the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework. The analysis reveals similarities and differences in the use of linguistic resources among the students, from which we identified several patterns of language use that appeared to be significant for realizing scientific meanings. These patterns of language use suggest that students face challenges not just in learning to use language as both a cognitive and a semiotic tool but also in interpreting the requirements of task when employing the language of school science. The findings demonstrate the productivity of this approach in expanding our understanding of the conceptual and representational challenges that students face when learning the language of school science. (Contains 4 figures and 4 tables.)

Models are important both in the development of physics itself and in teaching physics. Historically, the consensus models of physics have come to embody particular ontological assumptions and epistemological commitments. Educators have generally assumed that the consensus models of physics, which have stood the test of time, will also work well as teaching models, and for many topics this assumption is at least unproblematic and in many cases productive. However, in the case of electric circuits the consensus models are highly abstract and consequently inaccessible to beginning learners. Certain historically derived analogues for the consensus models are accepted in texts, but these are demonstrably ineffective for helping learners grasp the fundamental concepts of electric circuits. While awareness of other models circulates informally in the teaching community, these are not well documented in the science education literature and rarely referred to in authoritative texts, possibly because the models do not share the ontological assumptions and epistemological commitments that characterise consensus models. Consequently these models have not been subjected to a disciplined critique of their effectiveness for teaching purposes. In this paper I use criteria drawn from the science education literature to reflect on why I have found particular models valuable in teaching electric circuits. These criteria contrast with the epistemological and ontological features that characterise the consensus models of science, and my reflection leads me to attend explicitly to the ways in which meanings are created within physics. This suggests that all models, whether consensus models or not, can be used more knowingly for important educational ends.

How does one know whether traditional or innovative staff development is working? This study compared the effects of professors' attitudes toward learning through traditional staff development versus alternative instructional strategies for teaching community college students. Eight-four professors participated in this study. The average participant was a White female between the ages of 40-49 who taught in the departments of Arts and Sciences. For this study the participants attended workshops focused on three different instructional strategies for teaching college students--Programmed Learning Sequences (PLS), Team Learning (TL), and Circle of Knowledge (COK). These three strategies were taught in a counter-balanced design. Thus, each group of faculty was taught with both a traditional and a learning-style approach, but in a different sequence so that each group served as its own control in a repeated measures design. The Productivity Environmental Preference Survey (PEPS) identified the participants' learning styles. The Semantic Differential Scale (SDS) (Pizzo, 1981) assessed their attitudes toward each of the two different instructional approaches. The community college faculty's attitudes significantly (p less than 0.05) favored the learning-styles responsive approach over the traditionally taught workshop regardless of the content. (Contains 6 tables.)

Describes the introduction of a context-based physics approach in an Australia state. Presents a case study of an experienced teacher exploring how she understands what it means to teach in context and how her understanding shapes her classroom practice. (Author/MM)

Recounts an experience of developing a new course for school physics in the state of Victoria in Australia at the end of the 1980s. Represents a significant departure from traditional physics courses and was intended to broaden participation and improve the quality of student learning. Explores the reasons for this outcome. (Contains 55 references.) (Author/YDS)

Probes, through interviews with members of the setting panel, the process of setting the first external test for the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) physics course when it was implemented in 1992. Some implications are noted for future efforts to reform curriculum and assessment in physics, and for current classroom practice. (Author/MM)

Describes a unit of laboratory work which was unusual in that the teacher's purpose was to develop students' understanding of the way scientific facts are established with little expectation that they would understand the science content involved in the experiments. The unit was very successful from both a cognitive and affective perspective. (Contains 37 references.) (Author/ASK)