This study investigated the extent to which the proposed Factory of Ideas (FOI) teaching approach impacted on students' understanding of energy based on their prior knowledge. The FOI is a didactic approach that, unlike the classic cognitive conflict approach, employs a variety of activities to offer students a scientific conception for comparison…

Research in the past decades has repeatedly revealed that first year university students struggle to understand two-dimensional projectile motion concepts. In contrast to high school, projectile motion frequently makes use of components and it requires at least a basic understanding of trigonometry concepts. To follow the lessons and generate…

Physical sciences teachers in low-quintile South African schools avoid the use of inquiry on the grounds of inefficiency and ineffectiveness for test preparation. This avoidance is consistent with the view that the high cognitive load inquiry offers to extreme novices such as these learners may be prohibitive. Given the purported benefits of…

Children experience physical phenomena and formulate an epistemological worldview before contact with school science. School science extends thought about the same phenomena to deeper levels but does not always link with out-of-school experiences. This study explored preservice teachers' indigenous knowledge or tacit knowledge about the playground…

Scientific reasoning is crucial to any scientific discipline. One sub-skill particularly relevant to the scientific enterprise is theory evidence coordination. This study, underpinned by Kuhn's framework for scientific reasoning, investigates how university students coordinate their self-generated theory and evidence in a physics topic (energy)…

A study on the effect of the use of computer simulations (CS) on the acquisition of knowledge and cognitive load was undertaken with 104 Grade 11 learners in four schools in rural South Africa on the physics topic geometrical optics. Owing to the lack of resources a teacher-centred approach was followed in the use of computer simulations. The…

The influence of context on identity formation amongst young adolescent females and their subsequent participation in physics as a subject at Advanced Level (A level) is the central focus of this study. A qualitative approach grounded in an interpretivist paradigm was used for the purpose of this study. Verbal descriptions of the scientist they…

Recently, the South African Institute of Physics undertook a major review of university physics education. The report highlighted the necessity for further transformation of the teaching of physics, particularly in relation to the teaching of under-prepared students. In this article we examine how physics lecturers in South Africa reported how…

Teacher-centred strategies have dominated most physics lessons in Lesotho. This study attempted to understand the contributing factors for the choice of teacher-centred teaching instead of learner-centred teaching with the goal of informing a professional development programme designed to address this problem. The paper responds to the research…

The incidence and prevalence of alternative conceptions in science have been reported by a number of researchers. This article reports findings of a study involving the development and implementation of two intervention programmes to address alternative conceptions related to interference and diffraction of waves among 133 first year university…

The research reported in this paper investigates the impact of, and challenges with, encouraging argumentation on students' conceptual development in physics. It draws its theoretical framework from two socio-cultural perspectives of learning, i.e. that learning science occurs in a social setting and secondly that learning science is a discursive…

This paper analyses discourse produced in a larger study aimed at encouraging students in Lesotho to talk the language of science as a meaningful way of learning. The paper presents a semiotic and activity based analysis of discourses of students learning to talk physics while enrolled in a pre-tertiary access programme. Prior to the access…