The paper investigates the potential of utilizing artistic creation as an alternative task for assessing students in a non-artistic course within higher education. Eighteen postgraduate students of the Department of Pedagogy and Primary Education of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, after attending a six-hour course in…

Environmental content is becoming increasingly important in schools, but teachers may have difficulty grasping accurate knowledge. This study investigated how student teachers construct a conceptual understanding of biodiversity loss in an online environment. Sixty-five first-semester primary student teachers at a Finnish university were given the…

An understanding of biological variation is important for understanding ecological interactions, ecosystem function, and species' response to environmental change. Biological variation is essential to species survival because natural selection acts upon the phenotypic variation within a population: the more varied the population's genetic…

This multiple case study provides a lens into the ways three prospective elementary school teachers (PSTs) engaged in online discussion blogs when exploring the geometric concepts of area and perimeter. The online discussion blog protocol utilized reform-based instruction consistent with social constructivism. Through collaborative discussion and…

Problem Statement: Societies are facing several kinds of problems in the world today as chaos among the countries, conflicts between different groups, wars and diseases. It can be claimed that solving these problems is impossible unless societies care about humanistic cooperation, tolerance and peace. Individuals required developing fundamental…

The purpose of this study is to describe social studies teachers' perceptions related to their practices in teaching concepts within the context of social studies instruction in order to enhance students' vocabulary development in their classes. The study focuses on how students' breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge is supported by teachers'…

This study examines how a class of Grade 7 students employed linguistic resources to explain density differences. Drawing from the same data-set as a previous study by, we take a language perspective to investigate the challenges students face in learning the concept of density. Our study thus complements previous research on learning about…

One challenge of teaching science is getting students to communicate as scientists do. Scientists employ many different forms of communication as they develop and pass on information to others. Unfortunately, in many classrooms, student communication about science concepts is limited to filling in information on worksheets, finishing…

This article presents an authentic writing opportunity to help ninth-grade students use the writing process in a science classroom to write and illustrate picture books for fourth-grade students to demonstrate and share their understanding of a biology unit on cells. By creating a picture book, students experience the writing process, understand…

Learning about certain scientific topics has potential to spark strong emotions among students. We investigated whether emotions predicted students' attitudes after engaging in independent rereading and/or rereading plus discussion about Pluto's reclassification. Fifth and sixth grade students read a refutation text on Pluto's reclassification.…

This quasi-experimental and pre/posttest study was designed to examine whether fourth-grade students who engaged in collaboratively writing letters to 11th-grade students performed better on tests of conceptual understanding of a unit on force and motion than students who did not. The participants included 835 fourth-grade students and 416…

This article describes an effective strategy to encourage students to accurately self-evaluate their understanding of different mathematical concepts both before and after assessments. It contains examples of pre- and post-assessments as well as an activity sheet. (Contains 4 figures.)