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Book Chapter
Improving Science Teaching and Learning
In this chapter, attention is drawn to the issue of quality instruction and level of student achievement. The chapter begins with a review of the findings of the McKinsey report (Barber and Mourshed 2007) about the importance of providing effective i...
Book Chapter
Windows Into High-Achieving Science Classrooms
For most science teachers, the vision of science instruction has been limited to what transpires in their own classrooms and possibly those of a few select colleagues. Rarely do they have the opportunity to examine learning environments outside their...
Book Chapter
The Importance of Aligning Teaching and Assessment
This chapter focuses on the relation that is desirable between assessment and teaching activities in order to keep coherence with teaching goals and help all students to understand this coherence. The PISA 2006 assessment is discussed with respect to...
Book Chapter
PISA 2006 Assessment of Attitudes Toward Science
Science teachers want students to develop interest in science and value in learning science. Attitudes toward science play an important role in students' decisions to develop their science knowledge, pursue careers in science, and use scientific conc...
Book Chapter
What Science Do Students Want to Learn
A major innovation in PISA 2006 was that many of the science units contained one or two questions designed to assess students' attitudes toward science—in particular, students’ interest in learning about specific science topics. In addition, the ...
Book Chapter
Teaching and Learning Science: PISA and the TIMSS Video Study
Scientific literacy was the main focus of PISA in 2006, and a number of items on the student questionnaire asked students how frequently they experienced certain teaching and learning activities, or teaching styles, in their science classrooms. This ...
Book Chapter
Seeing the U.S. Education System Through the Prism of PISA
For some countries, results from PISA have been disappointing but at the same time, PISA also shows that strong performance, and improvement, is possible. Many countries display strong overall performance while some countries show that success can be...
Book Chapter
Teaching Science to Achieve Scientific Literacy
Historically, the study of the sciences as part of schooling was first introduced in the senior or last years of secondary schooling for the express purpose of assisting those students who wished to embark on science-based courses of study at the uni...
Book Chapter
PISA 2006: An Assessment Framework for Scientific Literacy
The PISA 2006 definition of scientific literacy had its origin in the consideration of what 15-year old students should know, value, and be able to do as a preparedness for life in modern society. The results of PISA Science 2006 provide important in...
Book Chapter
Designing a Science Curriculum to Enhance Students' Scientific Literacy
Over the past two decades or so, the term scientific literacy has become prominent in discussions of the school science curriculum and proposals for improving it. If improving students' scientific literacy is to become the central aim of the school s...
Book Chapter
Assessing PISA 2006 Scientific Competencies
This chapter begins by considering what is meant by scientific literacy and how the PISA 2006 scientific competencies encompass basic components of scientific literacy. Then it describes some examples of how these competencies are assessed in PISA 20...
Book Chapter
Scientific Literacy: Implications of PISA Science 2006 for Teachers and Teaching
In the first part of this chapter, the authors briefly review the notion of scientific literacy, emphasize its central focus in the PISA 2006 survey, highlight the overall test performance of countries and students, and make some observations about t...
Book Chapter
PISA 2006: Test Development and Design
In PISA 2006 three subject domains were tested, with science being the major domain for the first time in a PISA survey and reading and mathematics being minor domains. This chapter first describes the process by which the PISA consortium, led by the...
Book Chapter
PISA: Frequently Answered Criticisms
Studies such as PISA are routinely criticized by educational commentators—particularly when the results are not consistent with their preconceived ideas about the relative merits and efficiencies of various educational practices and systems. This c...
Book Chapter
PISA Science 2006: International Results
Throughout the world education authorities want to know the capacities that their students develop during their formative years in schools. They want to know to what extent students have learned fundamental scientific concept and theories and how wel...
Book Chapter
Knowledge of and About Science
An intuitive and common sense understanding of a science assessment would be that it aims at measuring students' knowledge of and about science. The aim of PISA is to assess to what degree students can apply their knowledge in contexts of relevance t...
Book Chapter
What Scientific Knowledge Remains When the Rest is Forgotten?
The PISA 2006 definition of scientific literacy encompasses three competencies—identifying scientific issues, explaining phenomena scientifically, and using scientific evidence. The results for scientific literacy show clearly that some countries h...
Book Chapter
What Lies Behind Finnish Students' Success in PISA Science?
Finnish students' performance in the PISA scientific literacy assessment has been excellent, and even improved between the three-year cycles of PISA measurements. It is not easy to explain the good results, but this chapter focuses on several factors...
Book Chapter
Overcoming Challenges and Succeeding in PISA Science 2006
Despite the absence of a national science curriculum and the inevitable differences in science curriculum across Canada, Canadian students ranked third in the world on the PISA 2006 science assessment. This chapter presents three possible explanation...
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Book Chapter
Whether or not a boat floats is determined by its shape and density. In this activity, students discover how and why boats float by designing different hull shapes and finding which design holds the most weight. Students record, calculate, and interp...
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Book Chapter
Determining the Size and Shape of the Blind Spot
What exactly is the blind spot? It is the place where the optic nerve meets the back of the retina. Because no sensory cells are present in the retina at the meeting point, a “hole” is created in the field of view of each eye. The brain “fills ...
Journal Article
The word sort is just 1 of 30 active-learning and critical-thinking strategies that was implemented into a community college nutrition course over an academic year (two semesters) during a mixed-design research study. The authors wanted to know if a ...
Journal Article
Interest in science and technology is essential to good citizenship. By adapting items from other scales and writing new items, the authors developed the Attitudes Toward Science and Technology scale, containing 30 items. The norm group consisted of ...
Journal Article
The many and diverse demands on faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) are such that any research endeavors undertaken must be efficient and beneficial to both students and faculty. Sustaining faculty productivity into midcareer and b...
Journal Article
In this month’s column, the author admits that she didn’t have a particularly positive image of student-athletes when she began teaching. She anticipated that the “student” part of that name was merely vestigial: a useless appendage not yet e...
Journal Article
Case Study: Learning About the Nature of Science With Case Studies
Case studies are an effective way to help students understand how science works, and perhaps even more importantly, how science knowledge is constructed. Yet often when we teach the content of science, we overlook the nature of science (NOS), and in ...
Journal Article
Favorite Demonstration: Using Dice to Explore the Consequences of DNA Mutations
Working collaboratively, students explore the effect of different types of DNA mutations using dice. The exercise provides students with a tangible way of visualizing how mutations may contribute to genetic diversity and the randomness with which the...
Journal Article
Thomas Lord in his column in the November/December issue of JCST claims that “The shift from academic merit to student consumerism is one of the two greatest reversals of direction in all the history of American Higher Education …” He goes on t...