There is a concern that materialistic thinking--meaning the tendency to attribute a set of matter-like properties to nonmatter concepts--is one of the central barriers that students face in the journey toward understanding scientific concepts. The cross-sectional study presented here used the Sound Concept Inventory Instrument (SCII) (Eshach,…

Problem solving is lauded as beneficial, but students do not all learn well by solving problems. Using the resources framework, Tuminaro J., and Redish E. F., (2007), Elements of a cognitive model of physics problem solving: Epistemic games, "Physical Review Special Topics-Physics Education Research," 3(2), 020101 suggested that, for…

As co-authors of a recent publication in "Physical Review Special Topics-Physics Education Research", we have received inquiries about the publication process. We will describe the process of creating an article based on team work, in our case the work of the Texas Physics Assessment Team. Many physics teachers have opportunities to participate in…

Background: Peer tutoring is a learning strategy where students take on the role of teacher. There are many reported benefits of this model however it is not well described in rehabilitation science curriculums. The aim of this review is to describe the scope of available literature for rehabilitation science education. Methods: A systematic…

Discusses how rock-cycle diagrams can graphically illustrate the interrelationship between materials and processes in physical geology courses. Reviews nine contemporary physical geology textbooks with regard to their use of such diagrams. (TW)

This paper aims to review and assess the strategies available in literature to improve the practices of science process skills (SPS) among students. SPS encompasses the mental and physical activities of students in collecting and organizing information and then using the information to make predictions, explain phenomena, solve problems,…

Attracting more students to the geosciences is imperative. We have an excellent opportunity to model an inclusive community, with hundreds of thousands of students passing through introductory college courses each year. A previous study documented gender and racial bias in physical geology textbooks. Six texts were reexamined to determine any…

One challenge of teaching chemical analysis is the proliferation of sophisticated, but often impenetrable, instrumentation in the modern laboratory. Complex instruments, and the software that runs them, distance students from the physical and chemical processes that generate the analytical signal. A solution to this challenge is the introduction…

Visualisation has been a critical means of scientific reasoning, knowledge development, and communication. In science classrooms, visualisation plays significant roles for teaching and learning. To better understand the landscape of the existing research on visualisation for supporting student science learning in K to 12 classroom contexts, we…

There is a long history of philosophical inquiry into the concept of explanation in science, and this work has some implications for the ways in which science teachers, particularly in the physical sciences (physics and chemistry), explain ideas to students. Recent work has outlined a constructivist approach to developing, delivering, and refining…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] In recent years, physics instructional labs have been under considerable research and development. However, there seems to be no shared understanding of how the assessment of instructional labs should be arranged to best serve students'…

Recently, GeoGebra, a mathematics education software, has entered the scene of physics education; however, research on how the software can be used to support teaching and learning physics is limited and scattered. The aim of this article is to present a review of the current literature on how GeoGebra can be used to support physics education in…

The authors describe the construction and use of tactile models for demonstrating intermolecular forces. These models are composed of inexpensive materials and can be used in college chemistry classrooms of varying levels including general and organic chemistry. The models were designed to be paired with an accompanying activity to encourage…

In this article, we propose a new model of student workload. We conducted an extensive literature review of student workload, its impact on students' lives, factors influencing student workload, objective and subjective measurements. The previous conceptualizations of student workload conflate student work and course workload, two related but…

Atomic/molecular visualization for human sight is usually generated by a software that reproduces a 3D reality on a 2D screen. Although Virtual Reality (VR) software was originally developed for the gaming industry, now it is used in academia for chemistry teaching. This work reviews the scientific literature on 3D visualization in stereoscopic…