To encourage the formation of science identity among girls, many scholars and practitioners have suggested to assign same-gender science teachers to students so that the teachers can serve as gender role models. However, direct evidence of any long-term effect of gender-matching is scarce. In a nationally representative survey of college students…

Representational competence is a primary contributor to student learning in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines and an optimal target for instruction at all educational levels. We describe the design and implementation of a learning activity that uses concrete models to improve students' representational competence and…

We developed and validated a new instrument, called "Measuring Concept progressions in Acid-Base chemistry" (MCAB) and used it to better understand the progression of undergraduate students' understandings about acid-base chemistry. Items were developed based on an existing learning progression for acid-base chemistry. We used the Rasch…

Longitudinal studies can provide significant insights into how students develop competence in a topic or subject area over time. However, there are many barriers, such as retention of students in the study and the complexity of data analysis, that make these studies rare. Here, we present how a statistical framework, discrete-time survival…

The purpose of this research was twofold. The first was to investigate the development of preservice teachers' knowledge base for science teaching on the rate of reaction topic within the 14-week content representation (CoRe)-based mentoring-enriched practicum course. In this course, CoRe design was used as a form of lesson planning and…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of experimenting with physical manipulatives (PM), virtual manipulatives (VM), and a blended combination of PM and VM on undergraduate students' understanding of concepts in the domain of "Light and Color." A pre-post comparison study design was used for the purposes of this study that involved 70…

This paper describes research on the use of journals in a general education chemistry course for elementary education majors. In the journals, students describe their understanding of a topic, the development of that understanding, and how the topic connects to their lives. In the process, they are able to engage in reflection about several…

This study explored whether adding a haptic interface (that provides users with somatosensory information about virtual objects by force and tactile feedback) to a three-dimensional (3D) chemical model enhanced students' understanding of complex molecular interactions. Two modes of the model were compared in a between-groups pre- and posttest…

The characterization of students' cognitive biases is of central importance in the development of curriculum and teaching strategies that better support student learning in science. In particular, the identification of shortcut reasoning procedures (heuristics) used by students to reduce cognitive load can help us devise strategies to foster the…

This study relates the performance of college students in introductory science courses to the amount of content covered in their high school science courses. The sample includes 8310 students in introductory biology, chemistry, or physics courses in 55 randomly chosen U.S. colleges and universities. Students who reported covering at least 1 major…

Preliminary pilot studies and a field study show how a generalizable conceptual framework calibrated with item response modeling can be used to describe the development of student conceptual understanding in chemistry. ChemQuery is an assessment system that uses a framework of the key ideas in the discipline, called the Perspectives of Chemists,…

We investigated general chemistry students' intuitive ideas about the expected properties of the products of a chemical reaction. In particular, we analyzed college chemistry students' predictions about the color, smell, and taste of the products of chemical reactions represented at the molecular level. The study was designed to explore the extent…

In this paper, instructional strategies for sustaining model-based inquiry in an undergraduate chemistry class were analyzed through data collected from classroom observations, a student survey, and in-depth problem-solving sessions with the instructor and students. Analysis of teacher-student interactions revealed a cyclical pattern in which…

Using a theoretical perspective of communities of practice, this case study examines a prospective chemistry teacher's inquiry-based teaching during his practicum. Conrad was a former student of an inquiry-oriented science course, "Inquiry Empowering Technologies" (IET). The research questions were (a) How did Conrad translate the IET inquiry…

The process of construction of meanings for the concepts of concentration and neutralization is explored in terms of "contextualizing practices" (Lemke, 1990, "Talking Science. Language, Learning and Values," Norwood, NJ: Ablex) creation of meanings through connections established among actions and their context. This notion is expanded to include…