Investigations in Science Education. Volume 14, Number 3, 1988.

Abstracts and abstractors' critiques of 10 published research reports related to misconceptions, attitudes, gender and miscellaneous issues are presented in this issue. Studies include: (1) the development, revision, refinement, and partial validation of an instrument to assess preservice elementary teachers' process orientation toward science; (2) a comparison of the effectiveness of three different methods for pooling student scores to provide daily data points for a time series analysis; (3) a study done to determine underlying factors associated with students' interests in science and to see if these factors differed by gender and race; (4) an attempt to identify concepts and propositions necessary for grade 10 students to comprehend the mechanisms of inheritance and to see which of these concepts and propositions were most frequently misunderstood; (5) a study hypothesizing that inadequacies in textbooks contribute to student misunderstandings and analyzing the genetics content in three widely used high school biology textbooks; (6) an examination of the conceptions of the human circulatory system held by students from grade 5 through college; (7) a study which examined the effect of preservice elementary teachers' cognitive responses on their attitudes toward energy conservation; (8) the validation of the Student Opinion Survey in Chemistry (SOSC), an existing student attitude scale, and a comparison of cross-national data collected using this instrument; (9) an examination of science and mathematics enrollment during high school and college concerning achievement, participation, and sex differences among students; and (10) an examination of the predictive validity of various tests for success of women in a National Science Foundation Career Facilitation Project. Two responses to the critiques in this issue are included. (CW)