We report a longitudinal study carried out along 3 years in an early childhood education (ECE) classroom in which we examined children's (aged 3-6) engagement with science representations. The research questions are as follows: (1) How do children's science representations develop from ECE1 to ECE3? (2) What are the features and affordances of the…

The purpose of this study was to describe the effect of multiple knowledge representations of physical and chemical changes on the development of primary pre-service teachers' cognitive structures. The study took place in an introductory general chemistry laboratory course in a four-year teacher education program. Multiple knowledge…

In this paper, we demonstrate how machine learning could be used to quickly assess a student's multimodal representational thinking. Multimodal representational thinking is the complex construct that encodes how students form conceptual, perceptual, graphical, or mathematical symbols in their mind. The augmented reality (AR) technology is adopted…

Because of the multimodal nature of learning, doing and reporting science, it is important that students learn how to interpret, construct, relate and translate scientific representations or, in other words, to develop representational competence. Explicit instruction about multimodal representations is needed to foster students'…

The central goal of this study was to examine the extent to which a teaching approach focused on the interaction between macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic levels of chemistry representations could affect high school students' performance in the field of inorganic reactions, as well as to examine how the applied instruction influences…

Web 2.0 technologies can be considered a loosely defined set of Web application styles that foster a kind of media consumer more engaged, and usually active in creating and maintaining Internet contents. Thus, Web 2.0 applications have resulted in increased user participation and massive user-generated (or user-published) open multimedia content,…

Processing of multiple representations in multimedia learning environments is considered to help learners obtain a more complete overview of the domain and gain deeper knowledge. This is based on the idea that relating and translating different representations leads to reflection beyond the boundaries and details of the separate representations.…

In this paper we focus on some of the findings of the science education research community in the area of representations and problem solving. Problem solving depends on the construction and manipulation of mental models (internal representations) in the mind. A large knowledge base (declarative, procedural, strategic, situational, and schematic…

While different approaches to evaluation will yield different results, depending on the purpose of the evaluation this article describes an evaluation approach that was aimed at investigation of the mental models of users of the programme. The study was driven by questions about the differences in mental models of the instructional designers and…