Despite the contemporary emphasis on students' practical work, lecture demonstrations with their unique power to stimulate students' interest remain an inseparable part of physics education. At our faculty, performing physics demonstrations for upper secondary students (DEMOs) has a tradition lasting three decades. In our study, we sought to…

Evolution is an essential underlying concept in biology. Previous research demonstrates that many obstacles exist that prevent successful teaching and learning about evolution. This research study used the theoretical framework of cultural border crossing and its underlying cognitive explanation, collateral learning, to design an intervention for…

General chemistry are key gateway courses for many Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) majors. To improve student outcomes, it is critical both to identify at-risk students and implement evidence-based instructional strategies and interventions. These remain active areas of investigation, with recent literature showing that…

Students with special educational needs (SEN) are often left behind in science education, and research largely ignores this population. In particular, very limited research examines the intersection between the nature of science (NOS) and special education (SPED). To address this gap, the study investigated 18 preservice SPED teachers' NOS plans…

The current study aims to explore how Thai preservice biology teachers make decisions upon and informally reason about two culture-based socioscientific issues, which are different yet contextually related. Participants included 46 fourth-year preservice biology teachers (12 males and 34 females) who completed a written questionnaire asking about…

Teacher performance has been linked with both self-efficacy and subject knowledge confidence suggesting that it is important to address these aspects within initial teacher training programmes. This study investigated the development of pre-service teacher's science and engineering subject knowledge confidence and teaching self-efficacy following…

One in four Australian undergraduate students participates in learning abroad during their study. Since 2012, faculty-led mobility programmes have overtaken exchange programs to become the most popular outbound mobility type in Australia. However, little has been known about how faculty-led short-term mobility programmes affect students'…

Recently, the chemistry education community has focused considerable effort on incorporating systems thinking into chemistry education as a means to address global challenges such as sustainability. In this project, a series of exploratory workshops was held with secondary educators (N = 12) and tertiary educators and researchers (N = 16),…

The purpose of this study was to develop a questionnaire to measure elementary preservice teachers' emotions about teaching science and mathematics. To achieve this goal, a questionnaire, Teacher Emotion for teaching Science and Mathematics (TESaM), was designed and pilot and field tested with a sample of preservice elementary teachers in the…

The Measure of Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (MATE) has been extensively used in science education research for more than two decades. This study examines the fairness of MATE items based on religious convictions and academic majors. The multidimensional item response theory and differential item functioning analyses were run on data…

Science teacher educators (STEs) have key roles in the educational system through their preparation of pre- and in-service science teachers and in implementing future-oriented policy reforms. Given the complexity and importance of their role, what types of knowledge do STEs need? STEs come from a range of backgrounds and there are few systematic…

Research on students' understanding of the greenhouse effect and global warming has been focused on identifying and overcoming misconceptions. However, to date, very few studies have looked into the ways in which student conceptions are organised and interrelated from a model-based perspective. In this study, we investigated student-generated…

The process of reflection is assumed to be important for developing professional knowledge through practical experience in science teaching. However, this claim requires more evidence, based on a clear definition of reflection. The main goal of the present study is to explore how reflection skills influence the development of professional…

Research in science education agrees that one of the key challenges of learners in the discipline is certainly connecting domain-specific representations to the underlying concepts. One way of supporting students to make applicable connections is using purposefully designed highlighting techniques in multimedia instructions. In order to examine…

Historically women have been underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Some scholars have suggested that science self-concept perceptions have contributed to this gender gap. We propose and empirically examine a model of the relationships between gender, sexual orientation, science self-efficacy,…