Reports on a teacher's changing perceptions during a collaborative, two-year interpretive research project involving two researchers, herself, and her students. Uses the collaborative approach between teacher and researchers to promote students' theory-evidence coordination and use of word explanations with an emphasis on developing and critiquing…

Constructs a teaching strategy to facilitate conceptual change in freshman students' understanding of electrochemistry. Provides students with the correct response along with alternative responses (teaching experiments), producing a conflicting situation that is conducive to an equilibration of their cognitive structures. Concludes that the…

This study analyzes measurement learning expectations involving area and volume in grades 1-8 across several U.S. states and high-performing TIMSS Asian countries, including Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan. Based on a review of official curriculum documents, results of this study indicate that the mathematics content, grade placement, and cognitive…

This study examines a commonly held view that teachers tend to focus less on developing understanding and more on mechanistic answer-finding when teaching in classes of lower-achieving students. The study investigates this by analyzing actual practices of teaching mathematics and of classroom interactions in classes having different levels taught…

The issue of mathematics underachievement among students has been an increasing international concern over the last few decades. Research suggests that academic success can be achieved by focusing on both the individual and social aspects of learning. Within the area of mathematics education, the development of metacognitive skills and the…

In this paper, we describe empirical research on the recording of primary school and preschool student teacher conceptions of the concept of distant force interactions in different contexts related to the school curriculum for this subject. For this objective to be achieved, we undertook ten semi-structured interviews with student teachers. Based…

Recent curriculum reform promotes core competencies such as desired "content knowledge" and "communication" for meaningful learning in biology. Understanding in biology is demonstrated when pupils can apply acquired knowledge to new tasks. This process requires the transfer of knowledge and the subordinate process of translation across external…

The conceptual knowledge of science processes possessed by University of Botswana science students and senior secondary school science teachers was sought through a three-part questionnaire. One part requested demographic data of subjects, the second part asked them to select their level of familiarity with the processes, and the third part probed…

This article presents the findings of an international collaborative investigation into preservice teachers' views on the nature of scientific knowledge development with respect to six elements: observations and inferences, tentativeness, scientific theories and laws, social and cultural embeddedness, creativity and imagination, and scientific…

This study explores the impact of "Scientific Communication" (SC) skills instruction on students' performances in scientific literacy assessment tasks. We present a general model for skills instruction, characterized by explicit and spiral instruction, integration into content learning, practice in several scientific topics, and application of…

This study examines the didactic suitability of introducing a teaching sequence when teaching the concept of magnetic fields within introductory physics courses at the university level. This instructional sequence was designed taking into account students' common conceptions, an analysis of the course content, and the history of the development of…

Responding to concerns that engineering is a poorly understood occupation and that young people are exposed to stereotyped images of scientists and engineers at an early age, this investigation sought to identify how science and engineering is portrayed in contemporary junior fiction (ages 8-12) and to what extent. An examination of 4,800 junior…

The present study explores students' abilities in conversions between geometric and algebraic representations, in problem-solving situations involving the concept of "limit" and the interrelation of these abilities with students' constructed understanding of this concept. An attempt is also made to examine the impact of the "didactic contract" on…

Correlation is an essential concept in statistics; however, students may hold misconceptions about correlation, even after receiving instruction. This study aimed to elucidate (1) the misconceptions held by senior high school students about correlation, using the tool of concept mapping along with interviewing, (2) the possible causes of these…

In the US, there is a significant number of learning-disabled high school students included in regular science classrooms. It has been argued that students with learning disabilities can succeed in science if they receive the kind of instruction they need. To facilitate such instruction, the special education teacher is often incorporated into the…