This paper analyses the opportunities for presenting knowledge that are created when assessment allows senior high school biology students to draw on linguistic and visual resources when constructing meaning in response to short-answer examination-style questions requiring a sequential explanation. Students within one senior high school biology…

The study covers the development and testing of the alternative mechanics survey (AMS), a modified force concept inventory (FCI), which used automatically marked free-response questions. Data were collected over a period of three academic years from 611 participants who were taking physics classes at high school and university level. A total of…

Mole, molar mass and the Avogadro number are used constantly to measure the amount of substance in chemical changes. However, students have difficulty in understanding these concepts because they are not familiar with measuring very small amounts of matter that cannot be seen and weighed in daily life, like atoms. The mole concept was developed to…

Organic qualitative analysis is one of the challenging chemical concepts in students learning of chemistry. The West African Examinations Council chemistry chief examiners for years, have lamented on students' poor performance in organic qualitative analysis at the senior high school level. This study, therefore, investigated chemistry students'…

Work and mechanical energy is a fundamental topic in introductory physics. Studies in existing literature have shown that students have difficulties in understanding work and mechanical energy, particularly the topic of work-energy theorem. To study students' knowledge integration in learning work and mechanical energy, a conceptual framework…

A new diagnostic instrument, the Conceptual Survey on Wave Optics (CSWO), was developed and validated on 224 high school students (aged 18-19 years) in Croatia. The process of test construction, which included the testing of 61 items on the total of 712 students is presented. The final version of the test consists of 26 multiple-choice items which…

Rapidly occurring advancements in molecular genetics, such as recent developments in epigenetics, are challenging traditional genetics as it is taught at schools. For example, the adoption of epigenetics--which provides molecular mechanisms for the environment to directly alter phenotypic variation--would mean that pivotal tenets in genetics…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop a game-based mobile application to help learners practice mathematical patterns and structures. Method: The study followed a mixed-method research design and prototyping methodology to guide the study in developing the mobile application. An instrument based on the Octalysis framework was developed…

An inequality concept has an important role; even in advanced mathematics, inequality assists in analysis and proof. However, students' understanding of inequality is not satisfying. The fact shows that students experience difficulties and errors in solving inequality problems. These difficulties and errors are not intentional or do not result…

In Spain, curricular guidelines as well as the university-entrance tests for social-science high-school students (17-18 years old) include sampling distributions. To analyse the understanding of this concept we investigated a sample of 234 students. We administered a questionnaire to them and ask half for justifications of their answers. The…

Biology education plays a vital role in nurturing the understanding of learners about the intricacy of life. Various efforts have emerged to strengthen learning biological concepts but there were still studies that showed that learners have low mastery in some aspects. To determine how well students understood various biological topics, including…

The concept of hybridisation is one of the most difficult concepts for chemistry students to grasp at all levels of learning. Research showed the students conceptual difficulty ranged from their lack of the prerequisite knowledge for grasping the topic hybridisation to chemical bond formation and orientations of atomic orbitals. This study…

The present work explores students' repertoire of explicit knowledge fragments relevant to the atomic structure, seeking to answer which of those and through which routes are activated by students when constructing their explanations for some everyday situations. For this purpose, six tasks describing different situations were given to 225…

In this article, we present the question of our didactic research on the relative conceptual evolution and transition from high school to university in Morocco. We focused on the difficulties encountered by students in the first year of the Physics Sciences using a questionnaire which aims at evaluating the evolution of the concept of…

Every student needs feedback to understand a scientific concept deeply. However, with a large number of students in each class, individual feedback is a challenge for teachers in Indonesia. Although there have been many studies conducted to maximize the giving of personal feedback, studies conducted by ensuring the consistency of a student's…