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Students' experiences with homework started the moment they enter the schooling system, yet very little is known about how students view homework. In this work, science students' views of homework, and the factors or experiences that have influenced their views of homework are explored. The participants for this work were 34 secondary school science students in their fourth year of secondary schooling. A Likert-type questionnaire was used to gather data on students' views about homework and a semi-structured interview was used to explore what experiences and/or factors have influenced their views. The results indicate that the majority of students perceived homework to be an unnecessary chore from which no meaningful learning emerged, and they suggested that teachers are inconsistent about collecting and marking homework, and that sometimes the homework tasks are either regurgitation, irrelevant to the current class topic or overly challenging and thus, beyond what is covered in classroom learning.

This case study explored what experiences contribute to the ideas of energy held by 30 purposively selected primary school students from one primary school in Trinidad and Tobago. The 30 students were selected from across all levels of the primary system. The study used the Interview About Events (IAE) approach to explore students' ideas about energy and further to reveal what experiences have led to them having these ideas. During the IAE exercise, flashcards of events and items were shown to students to prompt responses from them and to initiate a semi structured interview. Their interview responses were used to gauge what experiences contributed to the ideas they had. The findings showed that students ideas were as a result of many different experiences but that these experiences could be grouped into one of three categories: hearsay experiences, incomplete understandings, classroom experiences. Most of the students at the lower primary levels held ideas about energy arising from either hearsay experiences or incomplete ideas, while many of the upper primary level students explained their ideas about energy by referring to their classroom experiences. This paper presents the findings of this small-scale exploration.

Highly sensitive large-scale tin oxide (SnO2) nanostructures were grown on a glass substrate by thermal evaporation of a mixture of anhydrous tin (II) chloride (SnCl2) and zinc chloride (ZnCl2) powders at 550°C in air. We demonstrate a single cell vapor deposition system to precisely control nanostructural morphology of SnO2 by changing the weight ratio of SnCl2 and ZnCl2 and growth temperature. The morphology and structural property of as-grown nanostructures were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The SEM images revealed that the SnO2 nanostructures with different densities, sizes, and shapes can be achieved by adjusting the weight ratio of SnCl2 and ZnCl2. A thin film gas sensor based on SnO2 nanostructures with diameter ∼20 nm and length ∼100 nm showed ∼85% sensitivity and 53 seconds of response time, whereas the nanorods with diameter ∼100 nm and length ∼ 1μm showed ∼50% sensitivity with 198 seconds response time. The nanostructured material with small size and shape showed better sensitivity on sensing at room temperature compared to previously reported SnO2 based sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]