This study aimed to examine the impact of years of experience and field of expertise on the development of chemistry knowledge structures from STEM experts comprising 103 professors, 10 postdocs, and 146 doctoral students. Of these participants, 127 were specialized in chemistry and the rest were from various science and engineering disciplines.…

Beginning and expert supervisors' cognitions and cognitive structures were compared via concept mapping, a mixed methods design. Both beginning and expert supervisors reported a variety of cognitions representing developmental characteristics in 3 areas: assessment of supervisees, conceptualization and management of supervision, and supervisory…

To gauge the variability in expert problem-solving strategies for stoichiometry problems, a set of experts in different career tracks were studied with the cohort including 17 graduate students in chemistry, three college chemistry instructors, and seven college graduates working in the industry. The goal of the study was to determine whether…

One of the key agendas for the emerging field of disciplinary-based education research is the evaluation of the trajectory of disciplinary knowledge development from novice to expert. However, with the ongoing promotion of student-centered and collaborative undergraduate science classrooms, it is unknown how peer discourse during these exercises…

The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) can serve as a summative assessment of students' conceptual knowledge at the end of introductory physics, but previous work has suggested that the knowledge measured by this instrument is not a unitary construct. In this article, we consider the idea that FCI performance may reflect a number of student attributes…

The aim of this research is to determine what differences may exist in students' structural knowledge while using a variety of concept mapping assessments. A concept map can be used as an assessment which connects concepts in a knowledge domain. A single assessment may not be powerful enough to establish how students' new knowledge relates to…

Conceptual change theories assume that knowledge structures grow during the learning process but also get reorganized. Yet, this reorganization process itself is hard to examine. By using concept maps, we examined the changes in students' knowledge structures and linked it to conceptual change theory. In a longitudinal study, thirty high-achieving…

Adult performance of high ability individuals has seldom been researched. Current results suggest that adult excellence occurs at lower rates than high ability individuals identified in their infancy or youth, with few cases of high intellectual abilities among adults that yield excellence products. This paper focuses on the analysis of the…

While the majority of published research on conceptual change has focused on how misconceptions can be abandoned or modified, some recent research findings support the hypothesis that acquired scientific knowledge does not necessarily erase or alter initial non-scientific knowledge but rather coexists with it. In keeping with this…