Children from southern and northern Brazil have a basic knowledge of plants, which they observe during their everyday life. Children ages between 3 to 10 years old (kindergarten & primary school), but the majority of them in the age group of 4-5 (total 145) were asked to draw what they think is a plant (total sample=332). Afterwards, a equal number of boys and girls randomly chosen were interviewed individually (mix ability) to list plants they said they knew and where they had seen them. Then they were asked to give exemplars of the local plants which they had seen. These data from the exploratory study show that pupils are in touch with their environment and recognize plants that are part of it. The everyday experiences of these children in school and out of school, at home and in leisure activities with family and friends, contribute to their knowledge about plants and such knowledge is complemented in the preschool and primary school classes by appropriate teaching. Educational implications of these findings are discussed.

Personal connections to agriculture have decreased considerably in Finland during the last few decades due to struc-tural changes in agriculture. In this study, we will elucidate the understanding and conception of agriculture amongst urban pupils who have grown up during the 21st century. The research strategy consists of intervention in form of a farm visit, with pre- and post-assessment. The methods for collecting data were drawings for gaining a diversified un-derstanding of how pupils understand, experience and conceptualise agriculture. The drawings were analysed by visual content analysis. In addition, interviews, analysed by inductive content analysis method, were used to clarify the re-sults. Qualities of farms as authentic learning environments are defined and studied The study revealed that many pupils had irrational conceptions of agriculture before the farm visit (38 %), but decreased significantly after the visit. One of the explaining factors for these irrational conceptions was considered to be the influence of media sources. Farms as educational learning environments were able to correct pupils’ false conceptions. A realistic image of agriculture is of significant value for becoming an aware and responsible consumer as well as choosing a career in agriculture.

Scientific literacy has been increasingly considered a major goal of science education. While textbooks remain the most widespread tools for pursuing this goal within classrooms, they have been slow to adapt to the most recent epistemological paradigms, often still conveying distorted views of science and technology. Accordingly, we present herein a theoretical framework specifically intended to highlight the potential of textbooks to promote students’ scientific literacy. It is additionally argued that, often, the misconceptions conveyed by textbooks represent obstacles to the acquisition of a fair image of science and, therefore, to the acquisition of scientific literacy. Finally, a textbook analysis is suggested.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how mental rotation strategies affect the identification of chemical structural formulas. This study conducted event-related potentials (ERPs) experiments. In addition to the data collected in the ERPs, a Chemical Structure Conceptual Questionnaire and interviews were also administered for data collection. Eighteen university students majoring in chemistry were recruited. In the ERP experiments, the participants were required to identify 2D figures, 2D chemical structural formulas, 3D objects and 3D chemical structural formulas. The contours of 2D figures are similar to those of 2D chemical structural formulas, but they contain no content knowledge. Likewise, the contours of 3D objects are similar to 3D chemical structural formulas without content knowledge. The results showed that all students used similar strategies of mental rotation in identifying 2D figures, 3D objects and 3D chemical structural formulas. However, the high-achieving students used different strategies in identifying 2D figures and chemical structural formulas, while the low-achieving students tended to use similar strategies of mental rotation in identifying both 2D figures and chemical structural formulas. The results indicate that some of the difficulties in identifying 2D chemical structural formulas that students encounter are due to their inappropriate strategies of mental rotation.

The purpose of this study is to understand in an exploratory way pupils´ perception of science and the image of scientists at primary and secondary school levels. Data was collected by means of a survey questionnaire and a drawing representing pupils´ depiction what scientists do during their working hours. A questionnaire anchored on a Likert scale was filled by 204 primary and 229 secondary school children. Pupils from this sample considered science classes enjoyable, helped to understand issues covered by media, that science is a body of knowledge whose goal is to make life more comfortable to people. A total of 433 drawings were collected at 3 urban and 1 rural schools. Drawings illustrated scientists in scientific activity, mainly working alone, wearing lab coat and eyeglasses. Scientific specialization included chemists, biologists and a few technologist and astronomers. Educational implications are discussed.

This study attempts to reveal pre-service teachers’ conceptions, definitions, and understanding of quadrilaterals and their internal relationships in terms of personal and formal figural concepts via case of the parallelograms. To collect data, an open-ended question was addressed to 27 pre-service mathematics teachers, and clinical interviews were conducted with them. The factors influential on pre-service teachers’ definitions of parallelograms and conceptions regarding internal relationships between quadrilaterals were analyzed. The strongest result involved definitions based on prototype figures and partially seeing internal relationships between quadrilaterals via these definitions. As a different result from what is reported in the literature, it was found that the fact that rectangle remains as a special case of parallelogram in pre-service teachers’ figural concepts leads them not to adopt the hierarchical relationship. The findings suggested that learners were likely to recognize quadrilaterals by a special case of them and prototypical figures, even though they knew the formal definition in general. This led learners to have difficulty in understanding the inclusion relations of quadrilaterals.

Empirical directions to innovate e-assessments and to support the theoretical development of e-learning are discussed by presenting a new learning assessment system based on cognitive technology. Specifically, this system encompassing trained neural nets that can discriminate between students who successfully integrated new knowledge course content from students who did not successfully integrate this new knowledge (either because they tried short-term retention or did not acquire new knowledge). This neural network discrimination capacity is based on the idea that once a student has integrated new knowledge into long-term memory, this knowledge will be detected by computer-implemented semantic priming studies (before and after a course) containing schemata-related words from course content (which are obtained using a natural semantic network technique). The research results demonstrate the possibility of innovating e-assessments by implementing mutually constrained responsive and constructive cognitive techniques to evaluate online knowledge acquisition.

This study examines the subjects and concepts in biology perceived to be difficult to learn and teach by 759 pre-service biology teachers registered in the pedagogical formation program at Uludag University Faculty of Education in the academic year of 2005-2016, as well as the associations that word “biology” first calls to their mind. The study was designed as a survey model, and a questionnaire of three scaled questions was used as a data collection tool. The data were classified into 10 different categories based on different branches of biology: Anatomy-Morphology, Biotechnology, Ecology, Evolution, Physiology, Genetics, Histology, Cytology, Systematics and Reproduction and Development. Following the classification, the data were analyzed using frequency and percentages. The subjects and concepts perceived to be difficult to learn by the pre-service teachers are respectively as follows: photosynthesis and its stages, genetics, circulatory system, aerobic respiration, respiratory system, anaerobic respiration, protein synthesis, phanerogams, DNA structure and function, cryptogams, mitosis, plant systematics, endocrine system, meiosis, ETC, urinary system, plant physiology, taxonomy, evolution and digestive system. The subjects and concepts perceived to be difficult to teach by the pre-service teachers are respectively as follows: photosynthesis and its stages, protein synthesis, circulatory system, endocrine system, meiosis, plant systematics, evolution, mitosis, reproduction, genetic crossing over problems, Latinization of names, urinary system, genetics, ecology, aerobic respiration, DNA structure and function, plant tissues, glycolysis and anaerobic respiration. These findings confirm the need for developing undergraduate programs in biology and promoting the research culture at the secondary education level.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the meanings assigned by pre-service teachers to the wastepaper basket and waste (crumpled) papers in their drawings of a scientist. The study was carried out with 220 pre-service teachers during the 2015-2016 academic years. A phenomenological research method was used. First, the pre-service teachers were administered the ‘Draw-A-Scientist Test’ in order to identify their images of a scientist and then they were asked to describe and explain the scientist they drew. And a semi-structured interview was performed with the 34 pre-service teachers who included a wastepaper basket and waste paper in their drawings in order to identify the meanings assigned to the wastepaper and wastepaper basket by these teachers. The data were analysed by using content analysis. The results of the analysis showed that with these figures the pre-service teachers revealed their belief that when scientists conduct research, they follow a confirmatory experimental process in a similar manner to the way school science experiments. Based on these results, it can be suggested in the analysis of the drawings that waste paper and wastepaper baskets can be regarded as indicators of the stereotypical image of scientists and of the scientific method they use.

The aim of this paper is to determine the influence of blended learning environments on self-regulated and self-directed learning skills of undergraduate students. The explanatory sequential mixed method was used. In total 167 students participated in the study. While sixty students taking “Programming Languages” course at Computer Education and Instructional Technologies Department constituted the experimental group, 102 undergraduates-65 of them from the same department (Control 1) and 42 from Electronic Engineering Department (Control 2) formed the control groups. Self-directed Learning Readiness Scale, Self-regulated Learning Scale and semi-structured interviews were used as data collection instruments. While the experimental group received blended instruction, control groups received traditional instruction for weeks. The findings of the study revealed that self-regulated and self-directed scores of experimental group differed significantly from the control groups` indicating that the use of blended instruction is more effective than traditional instruction in terms of developing self-regulated and self-directed learning skills. Students in the experimental group pointed out that the blended learning environment presented rich content, easy accessibility, effective guidance and motivation.

The aim of this study was to adapt and validate Mindful Self-Care Scale (MSCS) with a normative Turkish sample. Participants of the study were 330 university students (232 females and 97 males) along with the age mean of 20.22 (SD=1.32). In order to validate the six factor structure of Mindful Self-care Scale, a confirmatory factor analysis was conducted. For providing evidence over convergent validity, Mindful Attention Awareness Scale-Adolescent version (Brown, West, Loverich & Biegel, 2011) was concurrently used. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis  displayed satisfactory evidence for the six factor Mindful Self-Care Scale (χ2 / df = 1.7; GFI = 0.87, CFI = 0.92; TLI = .91; RMSEA = 0.05). The scale was also found to be significantly correlated to Mindful Attention Awareness Scale-Adolescent (r=.27, p<.001). Also, the Cronbach Alpha value for the whole scale was found .89 yielding satisfactory evidence for the internal consistency of the instrument. The results of the study tentatively yielded that the Mindful Self-Care Scale is a valid and reliable assessment tool of self-care in Turkish culture. As well, further studies examining the psychometric properties of Mindful Self-Care Scale are still needed with larger and diverse samples.

Recent science education standards emphasize the importance of the instruction of nature of science (NOS) concepts at all levels of schooling from pre-K to K-12. Delivering a proper NOS education to students is excessively dependent on their teachers with an adequate understanding of NOS concepts. The present study investigated the science conceptions of preschool and elementary teacher candidates. The data collected from a total of 506 prospective teachers were analyzed with respect to the following demographic variables: majors, genders, grade levels, high schools and GPAs of teacher candidates. “Student Understanding of Science and Scientific Inquiry (SUSSI)” developed originally by Liang et al. (2008) was the instrument used to collect data in this study. The data analyses were conducted using MANOVA and Pearson Correlation Coefficient. The corresponding mean scores of the teacher candidates in specific aspects of NOS ranged from “poor” to “informed” conceptions of science. All but one of the demographic variables yielded statistically insignificant results on the NOS conceptions of teacher candidates. The majors of the teacher candidates were detected as a significant variable influencing the conceptions of the teacher candidates. The results of the study were discussed in reference with the relevant literature.

The aim of this study is to present pre-service biology teachers with reading texts about the research of Van Helmont and Joseph Priestley relate to the subject of photosynthesis, for their familiarization with the processual and contextual aspects of science and their understanding of the nature of science, and to reveal the extent to which these texts contribute to the teacher candidates. The study was carried out by “action research method”.  The sample consisted of 66 biology pre-service teachers studying at Karadeniz Technical University between the years of 2016 to 2018. In this study, two separate reading texts were prepared in order to increase pre-service teachers’ processual and contextual understanding, and after the teacher candidates had read the texts, they were asked to answer the related questions. Percentage and frequency values were determined by grouping the answers as “correct, partially correct, incorrect and unanswered”. The fact that in this study, only 47% of the pre-service teachers were able to form a correct hypothesis means that their skills in this regard are in need of development. Candidates experienced some difficulty in interpreting statements that were not given explicitly in the text. The candidates' level of critical thinking is at a good level. It has been determined that they have post-modern view as epistemological belief. There is a need for designing instructional materials covering conceptual, processual, contextual dimensions of science in different subjects at university level and presenting them to biology teachers in book format.

The purpose of this study is to examine the fears of children who are 6-10 years old via drawings. In this study, phenomenology research design which is among qualitative research methods was used. The study group of the study consisted of 314 children aged between 6 and 10 years in three primary schools in Kirsehir city center in 2017-2018 academic year. The data obtained from the participants were analyzed by using the content analysis method. As a result of the research, the drawings were collected under 6 categories according to their similar characteristics .When the drawings obtained from the children were classified, it was seen that the most fear is related to the category of animals, while the least fear is related to the drawings of the category of fears related to medical. In addition, children preferred to use black, red, blue, yellow and green colors in their fear themed drawings.

Since the 2008/2009 school year, every primary school in Slovenia has had to prepare its own “school moral education plan” and undertake its moral education activities on the basis of this plan. Although the basic content areas of the moral education plan are prescribed by law, the openness of the legal provisions allows schools to exercise professional autonomy. After a decade of the implementation of moral education plans we conducted an empirical quantitative-qualitative study aimed at analysing them in terms of content. The objective was to determine the extent to which the plans include and how they define the prescribed content areas, as well as the extent to which they include and how they define additional content areas that are not prescribed by law but could be included by schools depending on their individual particularities and the specific challenges of their environment. Data were collected through publications on the websites of a representative sample of randomly selected schools and analysed with a specially prepared instrument. The research shows that upgrading moral education activities through the school moral education plan would require (1) reconsideration and upgrading of the concept, (2) continuous state support for the self-evaluation of schools specifically in this area, and (3) support for schools to gain a deeper professional understanding of current moral education challenges and of forming moral education strategies that differ with regard to the content differences in the reasons for individual moral education challenges.

The purpose of this study is to develop an Interpersonal Mindfulness Scale-TR (IMS-TR) for Turkish culture. For the data collection process, four different sample groups participated in the study. To test the construct validity of the scale an exploratory factor analysis was performed. Results suggested a 13-item, two-factor solution as (1) awareness and (2) being in the moment. Two-factor structure explains 50.65% of the variance. A confirmatory factor analysis results showed good fit for two-factor solution. The Mindfulness in Parenting Questionnaire and the Mindfulness in Marriage Scale were used to examine a convergent validity and positive significant relationships were found between the scales. To test the reliability of the scale Cronbach's Alpha reliability coefficient of the overall scale was determined to be .826. To determine the stability coefficient of the IMS-TR, test-retest method was used and according to result there is a positive relationship between the scales. According to all of these results, it can be said that the IMS-TR has a validity and reliability.

University attempts to respond to globalization to build international trust by conducting internationalization as the bridge of their selected strategies. The efforts needed to build international trust are promotion strategies. This study aims to elaborate the effective promotion strategies in Jenderal Soedirman University, Indonesia. The data were collected by some deep interviews, observation, and documentation. The result shows that the promotion strategies includes, first, the university’s direction to be recognized globally by a strong vision, international accreditation for its study programs, and being the center of special studies. Second, the university publicizes the university’s programs, activities, excellence, and uniqueness through printed or online media, foreign institutions, and individuals. Third, the university initiates international collaborations with foreign universities and institutions by building good interpersonal communication, forming teams for international collaborations, initiating activities to build trust among individuals, and getting involved in international events. Last, the university offers scholarships for foreign students to increase inbound students.

Developing Indonesian English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ structural knowledge presents a number of complexities especially in the bilingual context. This study aimed to determine how the structural knowledge patterns of Indonesian EFL students is, and it specifically explored various aspects that make structural knowledge representation difficult. The research also aimed to formulate an accommodative assessment model for the development of students' structural knowledge. Using a case study design, this study involved 120 English literature students (N=120) taking the Psycholinguistics class at one of the tertiary institutions in Malang, Indonesia. The research instruments included essay tests and questionnaires. The research findings showed that students in bilingual contexts have certain diversity and patterns in their structural knowledge. Second, students’ structural knowledge could be influenced by a number of aspects such as topic mastery and the flow of thought. Furthermore, students’ structural knowledge can be accommodated in an adequate evaluation model that measures structural knowledge and critical thinking skills. Further research in the area of content and language assessment will complete the study of the significance of structural knowledge in a bilingual context.

This study aims to investigate students’ attitudes towards e- book use, and its relationship to self-efficacy and academic motivation in Omani higher education institutions. The sample of the study, which was chosen based on the stratification random method, consisted of 200 students from both genders and different colleges and academic years. To achieve the aims of the study, a descriptive correlational approach was adopted using attitudes, academic motivation and self-efficacy scales developed by the researchers, and administered to the study sample after assessing their psychometric properties. Findings show generally a positive significant correlation between students’ attitudes towards e-book use, self-efficacy, and academic motivation.

The Arduino microcontroller enables ordinary people to perform professional tasks that only traditional engineering professionals could perform. Recently, several educational cases have been applied to primary and secondary schools, which is a desirable attempt to popularize engineering education. This study meta-analyzed the effects of Arduino-based education in primary and secondary schools in Korea from the perspective of engineering education. Accordingly, 16 academic journals and dissertations were selected that verified educational effects by Arduino-based education to primary and secondary students in Korea, and 31 effect sizes were confirmed. According to the results of this study, the overall average effect size was 0.656, which confirmed that Arduino-based education had a positive educational effect. Furthermore, this study calculated the effect size as measured by categorical and continuous variables such as school level, the inclusion of curriculum, giftedness, publication status, the programming language used, publication year, number of sessions, and number of students. Implications were suggested from the perspective of engineering education. This study is meaningful because it suggests the application of Arduino to primary and secondary schools in engineering education by confirming the positive educational effect of Arduino-based education.