Creativity has become an increasingly important competence in today's rapidly changing times. It is a central aspect of social development, but it is hardly discussed in schools and often neglected in the natural sciences. In order to promote creativity in science teaching in a targeted way, it is important to understand the perspectives and views…

The central focus of my dissertation concerns the issue of representation. The issue of representation is important for science education research for two reasons: (1) the use of external representation in science teaching and learning, particularly in chemistry education, is ubiquitous as microscopic entities are not directly visible, and (2) the…

The central focus of my dissertation concerns the issue of representation. The issue of representation is important for science education research for two reasons: (1) the use of external representation in science teaching and learning, particularly in chemistry education, is ubiquitous as microscopic entities are not directly visible, and (2) the…

A chemistry teacher describes the elements of the ideal chemistry textbook. The perfect text is focused and helps students draw a coherent whole out of the myriad fragments of information and interpretation. The text would show chemistry as the central science necessary for understanding other sciences and would also root chemistry firmly in the…

This present study aims to determine the prospective science teachers' cognitive structure about the domain of buffer solution with word-association test. The research was conducted in the spring semester of the academic year of 2018-2019 with a sample of 71 prospective science teachers in the department of science teaching program at a state…

To be literate in modern society no longer means that one can simply read and write. In our rapidly changing world where information is available with a few taps of our fingers, critical thinking and process-oriented learning have become an essential part of being literate. Therefore, when many of the states decided to create a unifying set of…

Attitudes towards learning chemistry have been little studied in secondary school students, especially regarding dimensions related to problem solving, the molecular atomic perspective of chemistry, and real-world connection of chemistry. In the present study, we first aimed to design and assess the psychometric properties of the attitude to…

The concept of energy is of central significance, as it is a core disciplinary idea in chemistry and a cross-cutting concept in the sciences. This study sought to investigate student understanding of energetics and associated thermodynamic functions in chemical reactions and processes across a sample of introductory-level undergraduate chemistry…

Developing scientific reasoning (SR) is a central goal of science-teacher education worldwide. On a fine-grained level, SR competency can be subdivided into at least six skills: "formulating research questions," "generating hypotheses," "planning experiments," "observing and measuring," "preparing data…

Education in organic chemistry is highly reliant on molecular representations. Students abstract information from representations to make sense of submicroscopic interactions. This study investigates relationships between differing representations: bond-line structures, ball-and-stick, or electrostatic potential maps (EPMs), and predicting partial…

Researchers have typically identified and characterized teachers' knowledge bases (e.g., pedagogical content knowledge and subject matter knowledge) in an effort to improve enacted instructional strategies. As shown by the Refined Consensus Model (RCM), understanding teacher learning, beliefs, and practices is predicated on the interconnections of…

The central component of a chemistry PhD program is the research group, where advisors have significant impact on students' professional development and career path. Current literature indicates that communication issues of advisor-advisee relationships in some graduate programs arise because of the perceived power imbalance in advisor-advisee…

This research draws on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to understand the epistemic dimension of the higher education classroom discourse of a professor who is well evaluated by his students. In expository science classroom discourse, concepts are loaded with different meanings, a process that is called "condensation of meanings" in LCT,…

Reaction mechanisms are a core component of organic chemistry. Being able to handle these mechanisms is a central skill for students in this discipline. Diagnosing and fostering mechanistic reasoning is hence an important branch of chemistry education research. When it comes to reasoning about mechanisms, students often experience difficulties…

NMR spectroscopy is a powerful spectroscopic tool that not only allows the determination of structures after synthesis, as usually explained to students of Organic Chemistry, but also is useful in many other fields such as medicine imaging, real-time industrial processes, material sciences, or metabolomics. In this experiment, students performed a…