The development of children's cosmologies was investigated over a 13-year period, using multi-modal, in-depth interviews with 686 children (217 boys, 227 girls from New Zealand and 129 boys, 113 girls from China), aged 2-18. Children were interviewed while they "observed" the apparent motion of the Sun and Moon, and other features of the Earth;…

The present study draws on environmental science education to explore aspects of children's conceptual change regarding hazardous household items. Twelve children from a fifth-grade class attended a 300-h teaching module of environmentally oriented science activities aimed at assessing their awareness about the environmental and health hazards…

The research reported in this paper concerns the development of children's skills of interpreting and evaluating evidence in science. Previous studies have shown that school teaching often places limited emphasis on the development of these skills, which are necessary for children to engage in scientific debate and decision-making. The research,…

This paper reports a qualitative study on students' informal reasoning on a controversial socio-scientific issue. Twenty-two students from four science classes in Norway were interviewed about the local construction of new power lines and the possible increased risk of childhood leukaemia. The focus in the study is on what arguments the students…

In this study we sought to understand factors that shaped teachers' use of student inquiry projects. We examined, over 3 years, the practices and conceptions of two teachers involved in implementing student inquiry projects. Neither teacher was initially satisfied with her success at supporting student inquiry, but the two had very different…

In the commentary provided by Taskin (2006), he states that the authors' study did not provide valid information regarding the research sample. Taskin implies that it is therefore difficult to generalize findings of this study to Turkish elementary and middle school students. In this article, the author states that in their paper they provide…

Broad support exists within the science education community for the incorporation of socioscientific issues (SSI) and argumentation in the science curriculum. This study investigates how content knowledge and morality contribute to the quality of SSI argumentation among high school students. We employed a mixed-methods approach: 56 participants…

The research issue in this study is how to structure collaborative learning so that it improves solving physics problems more than individual learning. Structured collaborative learning has been compared with individual learning environments with Schoenfeld's problem-solving episodes. Students took a pre-test and a post-test and had the…

This cross-sectional study identifies key conceptual difficulties experienced by upper secondary school and pre-service chemistry teachers (N = 191) in the area of reaction rates. Students' ideas about reaction rates were elicited through a series of written tasks and individual interviews. In this paper, students' ideas related to reaction rate…

Framed by a "personal constructivist" perspective, this study analyses visitors' use of spontaneous memories in understanding different types of interactive exhibits, the nature and sources of the retrieved memories, and the way that visitors relate an exhibit analogically to memories of previous exhibits. One hundred and thirteen visitors (either…

In many developed countries of the world, pupil attitudes to school science decline progressively across the age range of secondary schooling while fewer students are choosing to study science at higher levels and as a career. Responses to these developments have included proposals to reform the curriculum, pedagogy, and the nature of pupil…

In order to study the beliefs of Turkish prospective chemistry teachers about teaching chemistry, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 prospective teachers. Analysis of the interviews revealed that most of the prospective teachers held intermediate (transition between constructivist and traditional) beliefs about chemistry teaching.…

This study focused on students' misconceptions related to evaporation, evaporation rate, and vapour pressure. Open-ended diagnostic questions were used with 107 undergraduates in the Primary Science Teacher Training Department in a state university in Turkey. In addition, 14 students from that sample were interviewed to clarify their written…

Many factors affect students' learning approaches, including topic conceptions and prior study. This research, undertaken after a first-semester compulsory subject, explores students' conceptions of biochemistry and how they approached their studies. Students (n=151) completed an open-ended survey analysed phenomenographically. Those with cohesive…

This study investigated the possible activation of different types of model-based reasoning processes in two learning settings, and the influence of various terms of reasoning on the learners' problem representation development. Changes in 53 students' problem representations about genetic issue were analysed while they worked with different…