It is recognized widely that learning is a dynamic and idiosyncratic process of construction and reconstruction of concepts in response to new experiences. It is influenced by the learner's prior knowledge, motivation, and sociocultural context. This study investigated how year 11 and 12 physics students' metacognition influences the development of their conceptual understandings of kinematics. An interpretive case study approach was used to investigate students working in collaborative groups in the context of an amusement park physics program. The metacognitive character of individual learners was demonstrated to have a strong influence on their conceptual development. Moreover, the metacognitive character of individuals within the small group contexts investigated was a key factor influencing the groups' collective knowledge development. A coyote–rabbit metaphor was developed to interpret the resilience and weaknesses of individual and group knowledge construction processes, and elucidates new theoretical understandings regarding metacognition and its influence on knowledge construction. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 91:298–320, 2007

The potential of a theory of variation-framed learning study, a teacher professional development approach, to help teachers overcome curricular and pedagogical challenges associated with teaching new science curricula content was explored. With a group of Singapore teachers collaboratively planning and teaching new genetics content, phenomenographic analysis of data corpus from classroom observations, teacher meetings and interviews revealed teacher learning that manifested in the teachers’ experiences. These were captured as (1) increased degrees of student-centered pedagogy and challenges to teachers’ prior assumptions about science pedagogy, (2) increased awareness of possibilities and limitations of their beliefs about science pedagogy, and (3) emergence of new understandings about new curricular content and science pedagogy. The possibility of transformative and generative learning is also discussed.

Analysis of views from a select group of Kenyan science teachers regarding the effect of student learning experiences on their teaching after implementing a contextualized science unit revealed that the teachers’ (a) literal interpretation and adherence to the official curriculum conflicted with the students’ desires to understand scientific phenomena embedded within their local environment; (b) inability or ability to sustain students’ motivations for understanding science through the local environment, which depended on initial teacher preparation; and (c) implementation of the contextualized science reduced the gulf that often hindered free student–teacher dialogue due to the teachers’ endeavors to maintain science and science teacher statuses.

African Ways of Knowing, Worldviews and Pedagogy