This study investigates alternative conceptions of chemistry concepts among Faculty of Science students at Palestine Technical University-Kadoorie. Students are found to have incorrect views about fundamental chemistry concepts. The study aims to identify these misconceptions, understand their origins, and their impact on students' comprehension.…

This study aimed to identify science teacher candidates' mental structures about the concept of the atom. This study included 120 science teacher candidates who were chosen using the convenience sampling method. This research is a phenomenological study. The data on students' mental models of the atom was collected using a metaphor form and an…

Evaluating evidence and restructuring beliefs based on anomalous evidence are fundamental aspects of scientific reasoning. These skills can be challenging for both children and adults, especially in domains where they possess inaccurate prior beliefs that can interfere with the acquisition of correct scientific information (e.g., heavier objects…

Current science education reform efforts have identified sensemaking as an important goal of science education, and science education researchers have studied what constitutes the sensemaking process in the science classroom. Because the studies of sensemaking are loosely linked to those of scientific reasoning, however, they have provided little…

The present work refers to a study of 10-12-year-old students' ideas on the self- or hetero-luminosity of the Moon. To check the validity of students' reasoning on this question, we also examined their ideas on the lunar phases and how we see hetero-luminous objects. Students supported their ideas on the self- or hetero-luminosity of the Moon by…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Qualitative Methods in PER: A Critical Examination.] Identifying student ideas about particular physics topics is one of the earliest and longest-standing foci of physics education research. This paper presents a method for identifying common conceptual resources for understanding physics, using…

This study reports on a case study about multimodal work in a primary physics classroom focusing on forces. Previous research reports that students benefit from multimodal work in science classrooms. Yet, few systematic studies have been performed to reveal how students represent their experiences and ideas of science phenomena over time within…

The purposes of this study were to identify middle school student representations of phase change, explore how they interpret textbook representations, and compare student and textbook representations of phase change. A total of 21 middle school students (12 sixth-graders and nine eighth-graders) voluntarily participated in the study.…

The ability to relate physical concepts and phenomena to multiple mathematical representations--and to move fluidly between these representations--is a critical outcome expected of physics instruction. In upper-division quantum mechanics, students must work with multiple symbolic notations, including some that they have not previously encountered.…

"Science and Children" routinely addresses the challenges teachers face in integrating the "Common Core State Standards" ("CCSS") alongside the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") (e.g., Forsythe, Jackson, and Contreras 2018; Sweetman and Sabella 2018). This article aims to extend this…

Metacognition is an important skill required for improving students' reading comprehension ability. Studies have reported effectiveness of metacognitive reading strategies to increase reading comprehension and information retention. However, there is limited research utilizing eye-tracking technology to explore the effectiveness of metacognitive…

The interaction between student language use and sensemaking is an area in science learning that needs further elucidation in order to meet government standards in science education. In this study, concept mapping was used to explore the relationship between scientific language use and sensemaking defined as the interaction between the scientific…

This review describes a computational chemistry exercise aimed at enhancing the understanding of upper-division undergraduates in organic chemistry and physical chemistry regarding the structures and aromaticities of cyclobutadiene and cyclooctatetraene. This exercise exposes students to chemical problems that require computational methods as a…

This paper reports the first empirical investigation of the hypothesis that epistemic appraisals form part of the structure of concepts. To date, studies of concepts have focused on the way concepts encode properties of objects and the way those features are used in categorization and in other cognitive tasks. Philosophical considerations show the…

Validated conceptual multiple-choice surveys administered before and after instruction in relevant concepts can be useful tools to gauge the effectiveness of curricula and pedagogical strategies. Here we discuss the use of four different validated surveys to investigate student understanding: The Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey (EMCS), the…