Whether and how teachers use ICT in their teaching and their pedagogical orientations are influenced by personal, organizational, and system-level factors. In accordance with the conceptual framework described in Chapter 2, the teacher questionnaire was designed to collect data on a number of variables related to these three categories of factors. Questions related to the personal characteristics of the teacher included demographic information (age, gender, highest level of academic qualification reached, possession or otherwise of a teaching license) and his or her self-perceived technical and pedagogical competence when using ICT. The teachers were also asked to respond to a number of questions related to their experiences of factors at the school and system levels: (1) the availability and usefulness of different kinds of professional development activities; (2) obstacles to realizing their [teachers'] vision for ICT-use; and (3) the presence of features indicative of a community of practice in the school.This chapter begins by profiling the mathematics teachers' and science teachers' characteristics and these teachers' perceptions of the specified school-and system-level factors. In addition, we offer some preliminary explorations concerning possible relationships between the personal-, school-, and system-level factors and whether the teachers were using ICT when teaching the target classes. In cases where

Chi (1992;Chi 1993;Chi et al.(1994)) suggests that much of the difficulties encountered by students in learning some Physics concepts arise because they attribute these concepts with the ontology of material substances while these concepts are actually a special type of process -"Constraint-BasedInteractions". Slotta & Chi (1996) also reported on a study where a group of students explicitly trained in the CBI ontology showed significant gains over a control group in problem solving performance in eight simple electric circuit problems. This paper reports on a series of four studies aimed at exploring the usefulness of the ontological categorization framework in investigating students' alternative conceptions of electric circuits and in developing a teaching strategy for promoting conceptual change in the learning of basic electric circuitry concepts.

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While simulations have widely been used to facilitate conceptual change in learning science, results indicate that significant disparity or gap between students' prior conceptions and scientific conceptions still exists. To bridge the gap, we argue that the applications of computer simulation in science education should be broadened to enable students to model their thoughts and to improve and advance their theories progressively. While computer simulations are often used to offer opportunities for students to explore scientific models, they do not give them the space to explore their own conceptions, and thus cannot effectively address the challenge of changing students' alternative conceptions. Findings from our recent empirical study reveal that, firstly, dynamic modelling using the environment WorldMaker 2000 in conjunction with the use of a cognitive perturbation strategy by the teacher was effective in helping students to migrate from their alternative conceptions towards a more scientifically inclined one; secondly, the pathways of conceptual change across groups were idiosyncratic and diverse. Respecting students' ideas seriously and providing cognitive perturbation at appropriate junctures of the inquiry process are found to be conducive to fostering conceptual change. In this paper, we will report on the details of the pedagogical approach adopted by the teacher and portray how students' conceptions change during the entire process of model building.