Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Educators have been interested in the global maker movement as it provides hands-on learning opportunities for youths to enhance their knowledge and skills of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This study aims to understand the maker movement from the perspective of frame analysis and collective action frames. Based on 33 interviews with makers from China, Europe, and the USA, we use diagnostic and prognostic frames to analyze the problems related to makerspaces and how makers solve these problems. The results highlight that makerspaces are deeply rooted in local communities as they both integrate local expectations with their ideal of making and depend on communities to solve internal problems. Makers also proactively change the mindset of what constitutes and defines making of other actors (e.g. public). Discussion focuses on the roles of governments and the inequity of resource mobilization in terms of STEM learning in the movement.

Nearly all primate species are globally threatened. Conservation approaches need to focus on local people and users of resources from the habitats of the apes. Students worldwide should become aware of the context and relationships in school, and they should change their usage and behaviour as the ultimate goals. This study explored the understanding and motivation of adolescents in German secondary schools (grades 5 and 6) introduced to out-of-school lessons in a zoo education program in comparison to a school-based program or no instruction. We developed 2 educational programs to raise awareness and concern for the conservation of primates: one was carried out in the local zoo; the other at workstations in public schools. Students (N = 1,013) participated in the study based on a 2 × 2 factorial design—instruction and place. Students from the zoo education program demonstrated higher content and affective achievement than students from the school-based and control programs; a combination of both programs did not lead to higher scores in the tests after the program. Learning in zoo school had a sustained influence on retention. Interest was higher in the zoo-based programs while perceived choice was higher in the school-based program.

This paper builds on results from a previous phenomenological study examining characteristics of influential facilitators of elementary mathematics professional development. The current study utilized a survey design where results from the qualitative investigation were quantitized to develop an instrument that allowed participants to identify qualities of facilitators that are necessary to motivate teachers to be engaged in professional development sessions related to mathematics at the elementary level. This paper describes the instrument development process and results when implemented to a sample of teachers in the USA (n = 565). Findings from this research indicate that participants share the same perceptions of what it means to be an influential facilitator as participants from the phenomenological investigation of facilitator characteristics.

Concerns about students’ difficulties in statistical reasoning led to a study which explored form five (14- to 16-year-olds) students’ ideas in this area. The study focussed on descriptive statistics, graphical representations, and probability. This paper presents and discusses the ways in which students made sense of information in graphical representations (tables and bar graph) obtained from the individual interviews. The findings revealed that many of the students used strategies based on prior experiences (everyday and school) and intuitive strategies. From the analysis, I identified a four-category rubric for classifying students’ responses. While the results of the study confirm a number of findings of other researchers, the findings go beyond those discussed in the literature. While students could read and compare data presented in a bar graph, they were less competent at reading tables. This could be due to instructional neglect of these concepts or linguistic and contextual problems. The paper concludes by suggesting some implications for researchers.

Current initiatives in science education in Korea have emphasized science literacy as the most important purpose of science education; that is, science education needs to focus on helping each student to become a scientifically literate person who is able to make reasoned decisions. In attempting to address this focus concern about science literacy, the researchers of this study attempted to implement the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach and examined both the SWH and the control groups using the modified Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP). Students’ performance on a Summary Writing Test (SWT) was also examined. Participant students of this study were eighth grade students in three middle schools located in the second biggest city in Korea. Each of the three teachers from three schools taught both the SWH and the control classes. The results of this study showed significant differences between the SWH and the control groups on the SWT. There was a difference in the total RTOP scores between the SWH and the control groups. Differences among schools imply that higher level of teachers’ implementation of the SWH approach would appear to result in better student achievement.

In this exploratory study, we developed a portrait of the challenges and strategic responses of secondary mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) in Chinese universities. The MTEs reported encountering more challenges when teaching pedagogical courses and supervising student teachers than when teaching college mathematics courses and teaching mathematical problem-solving courses. This finding reflects a key difference between the content, goals, and teaching demands of these 2 elements of mathematics teacher education programs (acting in the role of an MTE versus the role of a mathematics teacher). In this study, we also analyzed the strategies that MTEs use to deal with the challenges that arise in their work and the suggestions they have for the training of future MTEs.