مقالات رزومه دکتر زهرا مهربان

To improve the quality of student learning it is necessary to identify their misconceptions and find ways of correcting them. Such misconceptions in science, and especially at the elementary school level, could be of grave consequences if not remedied. In this study a group of elementary school teachers from four provinces of East Azerbaijan, Tehran, South Khorasan, and Hamedan participated in a short course on the essence of misconceptions and ways of correcting them. Then they reported on their observations and corrective actions over the period of one academic year. 336 such reports on students of first through third grades were collected. Data analyses revealed that most misconceptions are lexical, conceptual, and preconceived. Utilizing active learning strategies, teachers were able to both identify and remedy these misconceptions. All in all, results are indicative of participating teachers’ ability in identification and correction of their students’ misconceptions.

The aim of this study was investigation the teaching and learning strategies has been extracted from nano-science and nano-technology educational contents to find out the relationship between the type of strategy with content and educational period, and also making comparison between samples due to teaching and learning strategies. The study was conducted by using mixed method research (an exploration design). The population of this study was all pioneer countries in the field of nano-science and nano-technology in their K-12 programs. Samples (United States of America and Australia) were selected through nonprobability-purposive sampling method according some defined criteria. It was found that the extracted teaching and learning strategies (of the two studied samples) had shown high diversity, so that, the nineteen and twenty one strategies were recognized from the analyzed educational contents of USA and Australia, respectively. It was found the extracted strategies were highly affected from the subject and the educational period as well as the educational possibilities, priorities and policies.

The aim of this study was to present a model for in-service teacher training in nanoscience and technology, based on the findings of the nanoscience and technology in-service teacher training programs in the United States of America, Australia, Taiwan, and material - human resources in Iran. It was a descriptive-analytic research. The results showed that in-service training model adopted in the tested samples has been influenced not only from the educated knowledge, the education process, changing attitudes and mentality of teachers, but also from the human-resources, the extent of the teacher community, the period of training program and educational policies. It was also found that although there has been a mutual relationship between the learning approaches and learning models, however, blended learning approach is the one which has a good fluidity and flexibility both for teachers (as opposed to two very important variables of time and location of courses) and for training course planners of in-service teacher training (as opposed to the variables of distribution of material and human resources). Based on the results, a two-stage model including introductory and advanced training for in-service teacher training of nanoscience and technology has been proposed. Within these stages, considering the role of ICT, knowledge-based models have been ICT-TPCK and ICTeTD models. Also, in both stages, considering the knowledge-based model, blended learning approach as the best approach has been adopted.

The purpose of this study was to examine the Amr-Bil-Ma’ruf and Nahi-Anil-Munkar instruction in sky gifts textbooks and comparing its instruction throughout elementary school level. It was a mixed methods research with exploratory design which was done on the2nd and 6th grades sky gifts textbooks as the research sample. The first phase of the study was done through qualitative content analysis and inductive method. The result of such analysis was identifying and extracting the eight components related to the Amr-Bil-Ma’ruf and Nahi-Anil-Munkar instruction in the above-mentioned textbooks. Indeed¡ the results obtained from the first phase were used as the criteria for quantitative measurements of the second phase of this study. Here¡ it was revealed that the first and second components were of high frequency and much of textual messages related to the Amr-Bil-Ma’ruf and Nahi-Anil-Munkar instruction were dedicated to them. In general¡ despite the fact that in no section of the two textbooks there has been no direct and clear discussion of the Amr-Bil-Ma’ruf and Nahi-Anil-Munkar¡ however¡ it has been instructed in accordance with the students’ cognitive development¡ implicitly.

The main purpose of this paper, is to suggest an appropriate approach for including nano science and technology in school curriculum. To fulfill this goal, a number of countries that have included nano science and technology into their school curricula were studied. The study showed that the two kinds of curriculum integration approaches of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary is promising for this inclusion. However, due to the some limitations associated with teachers and curriculum developers in this field, the multidisciplinary approach for integration of nano science and technology into chemistry, physics and biology courses, found to be an appropriate approach for curriculum development in this regard. Thus, the research findings suggest that to facilitae the inclusion of nano science and technology into the senior high school curriculum in Iran, the natural science courses of chemistry, physics and biology courses could serve the purpose right.