A genuine interest in science is an important part of scientific literacy, and thus a critical goal for science education. Recent studies, however, have found that school science has not been effective in meeting this goal, an important reason for which is the lack of knowledge about what makes science interesting (or not) to the students. Using instructional episodes as the unit of analysis, this study investigated the effects of learning environment elements (content topic, activity, and learning goal) on student interest in science. The findings indicated that when judging the interestingness of an instructional episode, students focused primarily on the form of activity rather than content topic and learning goal. Activities that were “hands‐on” in nature and allowed for engagement with technology elicited higher interest. This study highlights the need to place more emphasis on the role of activity in constructing interesting learning environments, and in the mean time, suggests that student science interest could be improved by making changes to relatively easy‐to‐manipulate aspects of learning environments, such as those examined in the study. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 515–537, 2012

The importance of ''size and scale'' in nanoscience and engineering has been recognized by both scientists and science educators. A solid understanding of this concept is key to the learning of nanoscience. Students, however, have been reported to have considerable difficulty grasping this concept; yet little is known regarding their state of understanding. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a series of studies that were aimed at exploring the different ways students conceive of ''size and scale'' in the context of undergraduate nanoscience and engineering courses. Informed by Variation Theory of Learning (Marton and Booth, 1997), we identified four major categories (with two sub-categories within each) of student conception-fragmented, linear, proportional, and logarithmic. These conception categories, together with the aspects of variation that characterize and distinguish them, are summarized in a typology. In addition to serving as a diagnostic tool to describe students' understanding, this typology can also be used to guide the development of instructional interventions that facilitate students to move toward a more sophisticated understanding of ''size and scale.'' ß

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Assessment of student learning outcomes (SLOs) has become increasingly important in higher education. Meaningful assessment (i.e., assessment that leads to the improvement of student learning) is impossible without faculty engagement. We argue that one way to elicit genuine faculty engagement is to embrace the disciplinary differences when implementing a universitywide SLO assessment process so that the process reflects discipline-specific cultures and practices. Framed with Biglan’s discipline classification framework, we adopt a case-study approach to examine the SLO assessment practices in four undergraduate academic programs: physics, history, civil engineering, and child and adolescent studies. We demonstrate that one key factor for these programs’ success in developing and implementing SLO assessment under a uniform framework of university assessment is their adaptation of the university process to embrace the unique disciplinary differences.