The purpose of the study is to analyze factors influencing students' perceptions of teaching as a career choice using structural equation modeling with the goal of shaping a teacher education recruitment program. In this study, 458 students from a Midwestern university in the United States responded to an online survey about career-related factors they value, their expectation that teaching would offer those factors, and any social-influence factors that might encourage them to choose a teaching career. The effect of 10 exogenous motivation variables (value-environment, value-intrinsic, value-extrinsic, value-altruistic, expectancy-environment, expectancy-intrinsic, expectancy-extrinsic, social-media-education, social-priorexperience, and social-suggestions) on choosing a teaching career was examined. Results of our analysis showed that the factors related to expectancy-environment, expectancy-intrinsic, social-media-education, social-prior-experience, and socialsuggestions were found to be significant, whereas value-related factors and expectancy-extrinsic factors were found to be insignificant.

This article examines how student learning is a product of the experiential interaction between person and environment. We draw from the theoretical perspective of complexity to shed light on the emergent, adaptive, and unpredictable nature of students' learning experiences. To understand the relationship between the environment and the student learning experience, we followed undergraduate college students while they conducted independent, original research during an 8-week U.S. National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates. As we examined the scholars' actions and interactions-through their daily journals and regular face-to-face interviews-we utilized the theoretical lens of complexity to understand their experiences. The students' frustrations, challenges, failures, and successes revealed that their learning was an unpredictable and emergent experience rather than one that could be described as step-by-step and mechanistic.

Rules guide and constrain participants' actions as they participate in any educational activity. This ethnographically driven case study examines how organizational rules—the implicit and explicit regulations that constrain actions and interactions—influence children to use science in the experiential educational activity of raising 4-H market animals. Observations, interviews, and artifacts gathered are interpreted using Dewey's (1938) theory of an experiential continuum, with a focus on how social control in the form of explicit organizational rules influenced the children to use science. This study provides examples of two explicit organizational rules, market animal weight restrictions and record book rules, and analyzes the influence of these rules on bringing science into the children's 4-H experience. This study provides evidence that children involved in 4-H are influenced by organizational rules to incorporate skills and processes of science into their actions.

This paper examines the learning experience of 10 undergraduate students taking part in a US National Science Foundation funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at a Midwestern US university (National Science Foundation, 2014). The curricular design of each REU programme is created by the primary investigators and is unique to each programme. The programme discussed in this paper engaged students in eight weeks of computer modelling and simulation research in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and mathematical and/or statistical research. In this paper the theoretical perspective of complexity is used to explore the students’ learning as they engaged in research and the relationship between complex learning episodes and the environments in which those experiences occur.

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