Developing Standards in Research on Science Education: The ESERA Summer School 2004

Ph.D. students from 14 European countries, Israel, Turkey and Venezuela in addition to supervisors and lecturers from 11 countries including Israel and USA worked for one week to understand each other with the goal of improving and sharpening features of their respective theoretical backgrounds, research questions, and design and methodological demands. The projects presented reflect a multitude of topics and goals of research in science education in Europe as well as the variety and elaboration of theoretical frameworks used and a remarkable level of methodological expertise. The following topics are included: Teachers’ thinking and beliefs and teachers’ actions in the classroom, the interaction between specific programs of science museums and teachers’ and classes’ plans for engagement with them, teaching, learning and understanding of new subject matter for science classes, different interaction processes in the classroom, discourse analysis, decision making processes in science classes and the use of models in chemistry lessons and last but not least specific characters and the function of text when learning physics by means of computer-based multimedia. All science subjects including earth science are involved in these articles and the level of analysed e