The authors compared traditional and Web-based versions of an environmental education program in terms of their effectiveness in raising knowledge and promoting attitudes of environmental issues. They used a pretest?posttest nonequivalent control group quasi-experimental design. Results showed a statistically significant increase of knowledge scores for both groups. The junior high students who received computer-assisted instruction (CAI) significantly outscored their peers who were taught traditionally in posttest knowledge scores. In addition, the CAI group demonstrated a significant increase in attitudes scores. The authors found the correlation coefficient between knowledge and attitudes to be statistically significant but low.

The main aim of this project was to study young people’s ability to use science knowledge when talking about and explaining everyday phenomena involving transformations of matter. Students’ individual knowledge was studied both as their spontaneous explanations and as their explanations with appropriate help in discussions with the researcher or with other students. The framework for learning in this study was a social constructivist perspective of learning. In the project students discussed everyday phenomena with peers and with the researcher. The role of the discourse was stressed in the interviews as well as the development of students’ use of their mental models when explaining everyday phenomena. Data were gathered through four interviews with each one of 40 students, between 9 and 11 years of age.. The development of the basic particle model was one of the themes during the instructional units. Other recurrent themes were states of matter, gases and chemical reaction. Most of the students were able to use knowledge of science when talking about known everyday phenomena. Almost all of the students in the group developed the use of their own mental models during the project.

In a five-year longitudinal study, 25 pupils were interviewed individually at the age of 10y, 11y, 13y and 15 years of age about the role of flowers in plant reproduction. At age 15, each pupil listened to what they had said four years earlier and described how they thought their understanding had developed. All interviews were tape-recorded and the audiotapes transcribed verbatim. Analysis of the interview data and the descriptions of the pupils’ differential conceptual development were grounded in Ausubel’s theory of meaningful learning. At the beginning of the study the pupils expressed human-centred ideas. They commonly used anthropomorphic and teleological reasoning to explain the flower’s role in plant reproduction. Each pupil’s conceptual development from ages 11 to 15 could be described by one of four categorisations. Six pupils expressed alternative ideas all of the interviews. Many pupils had undifferentiated ideas of pollination and seed dispersal. Conceptions of the role of the flower in plant reproduction at age 10y were used as a basis for later conceptual development. An early introduction of some scientific concepts can help students develop deeper understandings of ecological processes. It is important to illuminate pupils’ expressions and ideas of science phenomena, give them opportunities to reflect on their ideas and encourage them to compare their conceptualisations with other explanations.

In this 6-year longitudinal study, 24 students were interviewed 11 times, between the ages of 9 and 15, to learn about their understanding of ecological processes. Students were asked about their conceptions of three topics: (a) the conditions for life of plants in a sealed transparent container, (b) the decomposition of leaves on the ground, and (c) the role of flowers in plant reproduction. At ages 15 and 19, the students listened to what they had said about these topics as 11? and 15?year?olds. They were then asked to state how they thought their understanding had developed. The interviews were analysed using principles from Ausubel's (1978) theory of meaningful learning. Characteristic individual themes in the students? conceptions could be followed year by year, especially with respect to their understanding of the cycles in nature. After the students had listened to their earlier interviews, they would often refer to experiences from an early age that they mentioned again and again. The analysis of students? descriptions of themselves as learners also made it possible to discern their different views of learning about ecological processes. In this 6?year longitudinal study, 24 students were interviewed 11 times, between the ages of 9 and 15, to learn about their understanding of ecological processes. Students were asked about their conceptions of three topics: (a) the conditions for life of plants in a sealed transparent container, (b) the decomposition of leaves on the ground, and (c) the role of flowers in plant reproduction. At ages 15 and 19, the students listened to what they had said about these topics as 11? and 15?year?olds. They were then asked to state how they thought their understanding had developed. The interviews were analysed using principles from Ausubel's (1978) theory of meaningful learning. Characteristic individual themes in the students? conceptions could be followed year by year, especially with respect to their understanding of the cycles in nature. After the students had listened to their earlier interviews, they would often refer to experiences from an early age that they mentioned again and again. The analysis of students? descriptions of themselves as learners also made it possible to discern their different views of learning about ecological processes.

Bokens innehåll bygger på en longitudinell studie då författaren följde hur enskilda elevers förståelse av ekologiska processer utvecklades från årskurs två till årskurs åtta i grundskolan samt hur eleverna såg på sin kunskapsutveckling i början av sista terminen på gymnasiet. Författaren beskriver och diskuterar elevers förståelse av ett antal ekologiska fenomen som handlar om villkor för liv, växande och nedbrytning i naturen samt om blommans roll.

Några av frågorna som ställs i boken är:

• Vilka föreställningar har elever om de gröna växternas villkor för liv och växande?

• Vad föreställer sig elever att det händer med döda växter på marken? Hur uppfattar de att jord bildas?

• Hur föreställer sig elever att tillväxten från frö till fullbildad växt går till?

• Vilka tankar har elever om blommans roll?

Boken vänder sig till lärarstudenter och yrkesverksamma lärare.

This paper will report on the development of a research program by a group of science educators at Kristianstad University, which has its roots in a longitudinal study I conducted concerning students’ developing understandings of ecological processes. Following the insights generated in this first study concerning the nature of student understandings, and the potential of the longitudinal design, a research group has developed at Kristianstad which has extended this work into related areas. This paper will describe my own work and its development, and link it with three projects that use a longitudinal design, which we have subsequently undertaken and in some cases completed. The emphasis within the paper will be on the findings generated by these studies on student learning and response to science, and the particular features of the longitudinal design that allow such insights to emerge. The paper will explore patterns of change, and continuity, as a way of appreciating the particular contributions of longitudinal studies.

The present study of personal context and continuity in 23 students' thinking builds upon data from a longitudinal study of the students' conceptualisations of ecological processes. Each student was interviewed 11 times from age 9-15 about these processes. At the ages of 15 and 19, the students listened to what they said at the age of 11 and 15, respectively, and described how they thought their understanding had developed. The occurrence of charac teristic individual elements in the students' conceptions can be followed as themes in the interviews year by year. The students could, as 15- and 19-year-olds, often reveal concrete experiences from an early age that they referred to repeatedly in the interviews. Even if there was a substantial conceptual development, there was also a very strong element of personal continuity. Conceptions that had developed at an early age seemed to be important for future conceptual development.

This study of personal context and continuity in twenty-three pupils' thinking builds upon data from a longitudinal study of pupils' conceptualisations of conditions for life, decomposition and the role of the flower. Each pupil was interviewed eleven times between the age of 9-15. At age 15 and 19, each pupil listened to what they had said four years earlier and described how they thought their understanding had developed. The occurrence of characteristic, individual elements of a content or structural nature can be followed through the interviews, year by year. As 15 and 19-year-olds, the pupils could recognise statements in the interviews as results of experiences from an early age. It is possible to follow a characteristic, individual theme in most of the interviews. Conceptions developed at an early age appeared to be important to future conceptual development. Early introduction of some scientific concepts would help pupils to develop a deeper understanding.

Following an intensive debate on the advisability of building a refuse disposal unit in the town of Kristianstad, Sweden, local people started to discuss what would happen to the residue from refuse incineration. From the debate it was evident that there was limited knowledge of what actually happens to refuse in general. Many thought that the matter would disappear, except for a small residue of ash. There was, in many cases, no recognition of the existence of waste gas. Most people found it difficult to realize that all matter still existed after combustion. This became a challenge for us as teachers and teacher educators. Is not this a kind of knowledge that citizens should acquire at school?

In order to be able to help students to read nature and to get an ability to discern both biodiversity in different contexts and changes in the environment we need to investigate how they experience biodiversity and how they discern different components in an ecosystem. Therefore, we undertook an interview-study of fifteen 10-12 year old students’ experiences of biodiversity and how they discerned organisms in different ecosystems. We analysed how they described the organisms and how they referred to experiences from everyday life. After two years we interviewed the students about what they said in the initial interview. Experiences of biodiversity at an early age seemed to be important for the future development of their understanding. It is important, both to give children early experiences of biodiversity in nature and to take students’ early ideas into consideration in teaching for lifelong learning and for a sustainable future.

Bokens författare börjar med att behandla de små atomerna, därefter cellen och villkoren för några olika livsformers liv och växande, och avslutar i ekosystemen och våra mänskliga samhällen. Deras utgångspunkt är övertygelsen om att det naturvetenskapliga ämnesinnehållet ska behandlas tillsammans med de ämnesdidaktiska frågorna.Den didaktiska belysningen är inspirerad av variationsteorin, en teori om lärande som utgår från att variationen är en viktig förutsättning för att vi ska kunna urskilja saker i vår omvärld. Fokus ligger här på ”lärandets objekt”, det vill säga det som eleverna förväntas lära sig, hur detta lärande görs möjligt och vad eleverna sedan faktiskt lär sig.Boken är främst tänkt som kurslitteratur inom lärarutbildningen och grundläggande fortbildningar för förskollärare och lärare. Den kan också användas i olika barnledarutbildningar inom natur- och fritidssektorn. Intresserade lärare som vill bredda sina kunskaper i ämnet kan också ha stor glädje av boken.Denna nya upplaga har kompletterats med två nya kapitel: ett grundläggande från fysikens område och ett om rymden.

Det är viktigt att ge lärare i förskolan och grundskolans tidiga del en fördjupad kunskap om möjligheten att ge barn positiva upplevelser och förståelse av grundläggande naturvetenskapliga fenomen. Därmed läggs grunden för ett livslångt lärande om dessa fenomen. Denna bok vill ge lärare och lärarstudenter kunskap i naturvetenskap samt ge förslag på undervisning som kan stödja och stimulera barns lärande.

In this paper we will examine the persistence of “misconceptions.” We used data from a longitudinal study of personal ideas in 24 students' thinking about ecological processes. The results show students often speaking about personal experiences dating from an early age, to which they had also referred in similar interviews conducted years before. These data are compared with results from a different study of middle school physics students' thinking about energy and steam engines. After the new learning had been “successfull” completed and assessed, old ideas returned. These findings are used to set up a theoretical basis for understanding the longitudinal results. Findings from memory studies are shown to explicate the long-term effects of the passage of time and prompts for the recall of scientific concepts.

This contribution will present longitudinal studies of student learning in science to show the particular strengths of longitudinal study designs to generate insights into student learning that are opaque in studies with a cross-sectional design. The studies presented here were carried out in different educational systems with varied time spans and ages. The studies have in common a careful gathering of data about the development of students' understanding of scientific phenomena mostly through interviews. In some cases the students have been interviewed about the development of their own understandings and of themselves as learners using previous interviews as stimulus data. The studies illustrate that the development of students' understanding should not be seen in strictly conceptual terms but are best understood as involving broader elements of beliefs, memory, mental models, epistemological reasoning, experiences from everyday life, and students’ sense of themselves as learners and knowers. The particular strength of studies with a long-term design is the possibility they offer to develop a richer and more complete description of students’ learning in science through the tracing of continuities in these personal contextual factors during the process of change. Such studies will contribute to a more complete description of students’ learning in science. We will also explore methodological issues associated with the realisation and analysis of such longitudinal design studies.

In order to develop successful teaching approaches of transformations of matter, we need to know more about how young students develop understanding of these processes. In this longitudinal study I follow, mainly through interviews, 20 children from 7 to 11 years of age. I have chosen to examine the development of ideas about matter transformation of three different phenomena; one biological, one chemical and one physical. An early introduction of the concept of molecule is also made. Depending of the phenomenon some children in different ways use the molecule as a tool for understanding, while others do not. The children develop understanding of the different phenomena quite differently. They rely directly on their experiences when explaining the phenomena and the development of words and language seems extremely important. To understand the challenges that children meet trying to understand scientific explanations it is important to know about the complexity and individual variety of learning. A longitudinal study like this with a qualitative analysis has got the chance to catch this complexity and variation.

In this paper we present results from a 10-year (1997-2006) longitudinal study in which we, by interviews once or twice every year, followed how students, throughout the compulsory school, developed their understanding of three situations in which transformations of matter occur. We believe that students have to meet scientific ideas early in order to gradually, in social cooperation with classmates, friends, teachers, and other grown-ups, elaborate the meaning of a concept. We followed 23 students all born in 1990. In 1997 we introduced the idea of the particulate nature of matter. We have conducted interviews allowing students to explain the transformation of matter in fading leaves left lying on the ground, burning candles, and a glass of water with a lid on. In the interview at 16 years of age, less than one-fifth of the students use molecular ideas in scientifically acceptable ways. The overall conclusion is that most students do not connect the knowledge they gain in school about the particulate nature of matter to these everyday situations. On the other hand, the students seem capable of using a simple particle model and the model can help them understand the invisible gas state. The question of how to use this capability in order to develop students' scientific ideas is still not solved and more research is argued for.

In this paper we present results from a 10 year longitudinal study with the aim to investigate how students use experiences when they develop their ideas about decomposition, burning, evaporation, and condensation. The theoretical framework of this study builds upon social constructivist perspectives. In our study (1997-2006) we have followed 23 students all born in 1990. We have conducted interviews allowing the students to explain the transformation of matter in fading leaves left lying on the ground, burning candles, and a glass of water with a lid on. Most students make progress in describing and explaining the situations in the first years of the study. Then there is a vast spread in the students’ capability to use their experiences and science taught in school in productive ways to improve their understanding of transformations of matter. We discuss the implications for science education research, compulsory school science curricula, and school science education out of these findings.

In order to develop successful teaching approaches to transformations of matter, we need to know more about how young students develop an understanding of these processes. In this longitudinal study, we followed 25 students from 7 to 13 years of age in their reasoning about transformations of matter. The questions addressed included how the students_ understanding of transformations of matter changed and how we can make sense of individual learning pathways. In interviews performed once or twice every year the students described and explained three situations: fading leaves left on the ground, a burning candle, and a glass of water covered with a glass plate on which some mist had formed. When analysing the interviews, we found a common pathway of how the students_ ideas changed over the years in each one of the situations. When analysing individual student_s interviews with Ausubel_s assimilation theory we could discern subordinate, superordinate and combinatorial learning. How these findings can contribute to an improvement of teaching about transformations of matter is discussed.

This article explores experienced primary teachers views on teaching for ‘reading nature’. The concept ‘reading nature’ has to do with an ability to recognise organisms and relate them to material cycling and energy flow in the specific habitat which is to be read. It has to do with the natural world that we face outside and the tools we have are our experiences from previous learning situations both in and out-of-doors. The teachers were asked to comment on the content of a CD-ROM with teaching sequences from a primary class studying a river ecosystem. Perceptions that teachers held were found to be supportive but complex and varied regarding the possibilities and advantages of implementing this type of teaching design in the everyday classroom. The paper finishes by identifying some implications for teacher training to support fieldwork and ecological literacy in primary schools in the future.

This paper reports on a study of ecology teaching and learning in a Swedish primary school class (age 10-11 yrs). A teaching sequence was designed to help students read nature in a river ecosystem. The teaching sequence had a 'bottom up' approach, taking as its starting point a common key organism - the freshwater shrimp. From this species and its ecology, the perspective was broadened to involve studies of the interrelations between organisms and finally to the relationship between biotic and abiotic factors. A large part of the instruction took place outdoors. Students were interviewed three times during the course when they were presented with a tray full of objects (both biotic and abiotic) from the ecosystem. The students' task was to name and describe the objects and then to link them up in as many relevant ways as possible, explaining the reasons for the links. The interviews have been transcribed onto concept maps and SOLO-taxonomy was used to illustrate their developing ecological understanding. Results indicate how students related several abstract processes and correlations back to the key organism studied early in the teaching sequence.

This paper is based on a study of how students' read nature in different ecosystems. Its focus is on ecology and the context is outdoors. This literacy has to do with an ability to recognise organisms and relate them to material cycling and energy flow in the specific habitat that is to be read. A teaching sequence was designed in order to develop a class of secondary students' ability to read nature in a forest ecosystem. After instruction they were taken to another ecosystem, a pond where they were asked to read the new environment. The main goal was to follow to what extent they can transfer their understanding from one ecosystem to another. The study is based on recorded interviews, field work, and classroom activities, and it shows the importance of learning general patterns in nature and relating them to functional groups of organisms in an ecosystem.

This paper addresses student-teachers' ability to read nature in a woodland habitat before and after a 10-week ecology course. Reading nature is our definition of the ability to observe, describe and explain basic ecology in the field. Data consists of field-based pre-course and post-course interviews followed up by metacognitive interviews where students analyse their own learning. A bi-dimensional coding scheme is adopted to examine the range and development of students' ability to read nature. Students find it important to know the ecology of a few key species and they recognize the importance of having learned the language of ecology - ecologish - helping them to describe and discuss ecology. Students generally recognize the excursions as key learning situations in ecology education but they give different reasons for finding excursions so important. This variation will be elaborated in the paper together with the implications for teaching ecology.

The purpose of this chapter is to give examples of what emergent science can mean for preschool practice. Children are seen as active in their own learning in communication with others. They experience the world around them with curiosity including a special sensitivity, alertness and a sense of wonder. Empirical examples which are reported build on teachers’ and 3 to 6 years old children’s work with “animals in a tree stump”. Children’s experiences of ecological phenomena are related to their interaction with the teachers. The analysis shows that children have a growing curiosity to learn more about different scientific phenomena. There is a need for teachers to recognise and use the possibilities to challenge children to develop deeper understanding of a scientific content area. If teachers meet children’s questions seriously such an approach can be a foundation for the development of children’s understanding, a lifelong learning and learning for a sustainable future.

Empirical examples which are used built on a preschool’s work with ‘animals in a tree stump’ with special relations to organisms need for food, space, water and air. We will also discuss the characterizations of air, food and water in relation to children’s’ experiences and teachers interactions. Children three to six years old and teachers take part in the study.

The analysis shows that children have a growing curiosity to learn more about different scientific phenomenons. It is also showed that there is a need for teachers to recognise and to use the possibilities to challenge children to develop deeper understanding of scientific phenomenon. If teachers meet children’s questions seriously it could be a foundation for lifelong and sustainable learning.

On the basis of an increasing awareness about the importance of ecological questions and the need for a sustainable development, it has been argued that Swedish preschool children shall develop knowledge also about natural science. One important aspect of this is to make ecological phenomena visible in children’s every day life. The aim of the present paper is to report on a study of verbal communication between teachers and children in preschool about ecological phenomena. Children are here seen as active in their own learning and that develops on the basis of their own experiences in communication with the surrounding world. 21 children (3-6 years) and three teachers participate in the study. Six of the 21 children do not have Swedish as their first language.  A preschool unit was followed by video observation during two months when working on themes about life in a tree stump and decomposition of leaves. Focusing the verbal communication the data observations have been transcribed. Then the transcriptions were analysed from the know-what and the know-how aspect of learning. The result is presented on the basis of the communication of the what-perspective and is discussed in terms of what is noticed and how the children’s understandings are communicated.  Finally we discuss the connections between children’s ability to understand and communicate their observations, as well as the role of the preschool teacher and education for a sustainable development.