This book contains papers presented at the International Conference on Science Education 2012, ICSE 2012, held in Nanjing University, Nanjing, China. It features the work of science education researchers from around the world addressing a common theme, Science Education: Policies and Social Responsibilities.The book covers a range of topics including international science education standards, public science education and science teacher education. It also examines how STEM education has dominated some countries’ science education policy, ways brain research might provide new approaches for assessment, how some countries are developing their new national science education standards with research-based evidence and ways science teacher educators can learn from each other.Science education research is vital in the development of national science education policies, including science education standards, teacher professional development and public understanding of science. Featuring the work of an international group of science education researchers, this book offers many insightful ideas, experiences and strategies that will help readers better understand and address challenges in the field.

This biannual conference in Pahang, Malaysia, is a clearing house for many of the latest research findings in a highly multidisciplinary field. The contributions span a host of academic disciplines which are themselves rapidly evolving, making this collection of 90 selected papers an invaluable snapshot of an arena of pure and applied science that produces many versatile innovations. The book covers a multitude of topics ranging from the sciences (pure and applied) to technology (computing and engineering), and on to social science disciplines such as business, education, and linguistics. The papers have been carefully chosen to represent the leading edge of the current research effort, and come from individuals and teams working right around the globe. They are a trusted point of reference for academicians and students intending to pursue higher-order research projects in relevant fields, and form a major contribution to the international exchange of ideas and strategies in the various technological and social science disciplines. It is the sheer scope of this volume that ensures its relevance in a scientific climate with a marked trend towards disciplinary synthesis.

This volume investigates a number of issues needed to develop a modular, effective, versatile, cost effective, pedagogically-embedded, user-friendly, and sustainable online laboratory system that can deliver its true potential in the national and global arenas. This allows individual researchers to develop their own modular systems with a level of creativity and innovation while at the same time ensuring continuing growth by separating the responsibility for creating online laboratories from the responsibility for overseeing the students who use them. The volume first introduces the reader to several system architectures that have proven successful in many online laboratory settings. The following chapters then describe real-life experiences in the area of online laboratories from both technological and educational points of view. The volume further collects experiences and evidence on the effective use of online labs in the context of a diversity of pedagogical issues. It also illustrates successful online laboratories to highlight best practices as case studies and describes the technological design strategies, implementation details, and classroom activities as well as learning from these developments. Finally the volume describes the creation and deployment of commercial products, tools and services for online laboratory development. It also provides an idea about the developments that are on the horizon to support this area.