An attempt was made to investigate two aspects of the learning and teaching context. One deals with how the sets of beliefs or expectations pupils hold about some phenomena affect the sense they make of experiences given to them in science classes. The other deals with the potential effect of the inevitable use of "scientific" and "everyday" language by both teachers and pupils in instruction. A sample of thirty Portuguese students from grade five to grade nine (10-15 years old) were given laboratory experiences and "parallel" everyday phenomena to discuss individually with the interviewer and then were invited to describe orally what and why things happened. The fundamental conceptions that students hold, the changes of these conceptions with students' age, as well as their consistency in different contexts and in similar tasks were identified in this experiment. The results suggested that these students, although having been exposed to formal teaching, still retain and use intuitive notions to think: about experiences in science lessons. The focus of the second experiment was to investigate how teachers' own perceptions may influence the development of pupils' ideas. It was carried out by observing seven teachers during ordinary classroom activities, to discover the relative contributions of 'scientific' and 'everyday' meaning in the language they used. Common features in teachers' and students' conceptualizations of "heat", "temperature" and "energy" were identified. Two main questions were discussed: i) what are the implications of the semantic variability in the disparate linguistic references for science education? ii) how to bridge the gap between teachers' and students' understandings, i.e., what connections can be made between what teachers and students talk about and perceive from discourse in the classroom? The results of this study seemed to reinforce the idea that it is impossible to keep external, everyday, informal culture out of the science classroom.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DXN100594.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Education, December 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-201). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.I.T.)--The Evergreen State College, 2010. / Title from title screen (viewed 7/7/2010). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-108).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 209-218). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.I.T.)--The Evergreen State College, 2007. / Title from title screen viewed (6/23/2008). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 149-157).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references: (p. 209-218). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

In 1987, as a matter of utmost urgency and importance, Negara Brunei Darussalam called for a new system of education that emphasized nationalistic commitment: “Languages for Bruneians”. With the era of globalization, the Brunei Ministry of education argued that new patterns of communication were necessary and implemented a bilingual policy where children are taught in Malay until the fourth year of primary school when the medium of instruction changes to English. While the new policy supports Bruneians’ proficiency in two languages, rumour has been magnified through recent established research findings that a large percentage of pupils are underachieving in science. The main focus of this study is the effect of language transfer, from Malay to English as the medium of instruction, on the development of children’s conceptual understanding in science. Two clusters of science concepts, evaporation and condensation and living and non-living, provide the science context through which children’s understanding is explored. The theoretical framework that includes viewing and examining children’s conceptual understanding from conceptual development and epistemological and ontological perspectives of conceptual change informs the analysis of this study. The research design employed a cross sectional case study method involving the administration of interviews to a total of 255 children aged between 6 and 12 years of age. The interviews about the concepts of evaporation and condensation involved two phases. For the first phase, 60 children from each primary level of 1, 3 and 4 (total n = 180) were interviewed. Fourteen months later, 18 children from the same sample were selected based on their fluency in the first interviews and revisited for more detailed interviews. / For the concepts of living and non-living, 75 children were chosen from a wider range of primary levels, fifteen from each level of Primary 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Each participant in this study was asked 2 types of questions; forced-response and semi-structured. For the forced-response questions, scores were entered into the Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) computer software based on a 5- point scale. For the semi-structured questions, analysis involved initial grouping of responses before entry into the software and quantitative manipulation. The data from the semi-structured interviews also were analysed qualitatively with systematic searches for themes and evidence that supported and disconfirmed the quantitative results. As this study produced qualitative as well as quantitative data, rigour was determined by two sets of parallel criteria. Ensuring rigour for the quantitative data involved the criteria of validity and reliability. Within the qualitative paradigm, the criteria that evolved in response to the quality of the research were credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability. The results indicated a steady progress of conceptual understanding when the pupils’ explanations about the concepts of evaporation and condensation were in Malay. However, the pattern of development of understanding did not reach projected patterns i n Primary 4 when only English responses were analysed. The findings show that the change in language of instruction significantly hampered communication about and possibly conceptual understanding of the cluster of concepts associated with evaporation and condensation. / Similarly, the findings about children’s conceptual understanding of living and non-living suggested that the expected patterns of development were not realised. Closer qualitative inspection of the data revealed that the idiosyncratic nature of the bilingual system perpetuated particular misconceptions specifically related to the nature of the Malay and English languages in both clusters of concepts. The primary conclusion of the study was that the change in language of instruction from Malay to English in Brunei primary schools had a significant, detrimental impact on the children’s expressed understanding of the concepts associated with evaporation and condensation and living and non-living.

Two studies were undertaken in order to investigate the effect of different forms of error feedback and error framing in learning a complex novel task. The experimental task in both studies was a computer-based simulation of a group management situation. After each of the 12 trials, all participants received feedback about their performance on that trial. Participants receiving signal error feedback were also advised as to where they had made errors. Participants receiving diagnostic feedback were told how they could have achieved optimum performance on the previous trial. Learning, performance, strategy, exploration and depth of processing were measured during the task. Self-report measures of self-efficacy, self-set goals, satisfaction and intrinsic motivation were taken after the first six trials and again after all 12 trials were completed. In study 1, detailed diagnostic feedback was associated with better performance than feedback which simply signaled where an error had been made, or feedback that did not identify errors. Diagnostic feedback facilitated the development and use of effective problem-solving strategies and discouraged trial-and-error exploration of the problem space. In this research, exploration was found to be negatively associated with learning and performance. Learners??? self-efficacy moderated the effects of error feedback: learners with high self-efficacy showed high levels of performance regardless of the level of information that the feedback provided but for those with low self-efficacy, detailed diagnostic feedback was essential for the learning process. In the second study, positive error framing (error management) was investigated as a possible means of making signal error feedback more valuable in learning. However while positive error framing was associated with more exploration as expected, it also produced poorer strategies and worse performance than negative error framing (error avoidance instructions). Participants who used good learning strategies instead of exploration performed well despite impoverished feedback. Self-efficacy moderated the impact of error framing: positive error framing helped those with low self-efficacy, but for those with higher self-efficacy it was of more value to encourage error avoidance than error tolerance. The findings show important interactions between error framing, error feedback and learner characteristics.