By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it was clear that nanotechnology was emerging as one of the most promising and rapidly expanding fields of research and development worldwide. It would not be long before scientists, science educators, engineers, and policy makers began advocating for nanoscience, engineering, and technology (NSET) related concepts to be introduced in K-12 classrooms. Indeed, there has been a surge in the development of pre-college NSET-related education programs over the last decade, as well as millions in funding to support the creation of these programs. In an effort to characterize the state of research to date on pre-college students' and teachers' learning of NSET content knowledge and related practices, we have conducted a systematic review of the peer-reviewed, published research studies to answer the following questions: What NSET content knowledge and practices in a pre-college context have been examined in empirical learning studies? What do these studies tell us about the NSET content knowledge and practices that pre-college students and teachers are learning? Implications and recommendations for future research are also discussed.

As nanoscale science, engineering, and technology (NSET) becomes more integrated into precollege science curricula, it is crucial for teachers to develop coherent understandings of science principles (e.g., the structure of matter, size and scale, forces and interactions, and size-dependent properties) that allow them to coordinate these understandings from the macro-to the nanoscale. Furthermore, as teachers acquire new NSET content knowledge through professional learning opportunities, it is incumbent upon NSET educators to understand their developing content knowledge. To this end, we report results from a study in which we used a pre-/post-/delayed-posttest design to examine the change in 24 secondary (grades 7 -12) science teachers ' NSET content knowledge as a result of their participation in a year-long professional development program that consisted of a 2-week intensive course and academic year follow-up activities. Participants showed signifi cant gains from pretest to posttest and signifi cant gains on the delayed test compared to the pretest. We also present trends that emerged in teachers ' open-ended responses that provided deeper insight into teachers ' NSET content knowledge. Finally, we discuss issues related to the assessment of teachers ' NSET content knowledge as well as the design of NSET professional development for teachers.

Lafayette. Magana's research interests are centered on the integration of cyberinfrastructure, computation, and computational tools and methods to: (a) leverage the understanding of complex phenomena in science and engineering and (b) support scientific inquiry learning and innovation. Specific efforts focus on studying cyberinfrastructure affordances and identifying how to incorporate advances from the learning sciences into authoring curriculum, assessment, and learning materials to appropriately support learning processes.

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We examined Finnish lower secondary students’ mental models of magnetism through their drawings, written explanations and interviews. Secondary students in Finland (N=12) engaged in six lessons designed specifically to target three key concepts in understanding magnetism: structure and organization (magnetic domains), magnetic fields and magnetic interactions. We describe how, with a finite number of key concepts introduced, students reflected upon and revised their mental models of magnetism and magnetic interactions towards more sophisticated and normative scientific views. We found two new categories of students’ models: the pole model and pole/field model. The critical moments in evolving the models happened during the investigations regarding understanding magnetic fields and magnetic internal structure. This article gives an example for teachers and researchers of how to follow students’ development of mental models in science.