Background: Creating concept maps can help students overcome challenges of accurate knowledge monitoring and thus foster learning. However, students' knowledge often contains gaps and misconceptions, even after concept map creation. Theoretically, students could benefit from additional support, but it is unclear whether this might also be the case…

Context-Based Learning (CBL) and learning through developing and using models are two important teaching approaches for chemistry conceptual understanding. We aimed to examine the influence of a CBL approach on students' understanding of Multiple Models of Knowledge Representations ("MMKRs") and "multiple molecular…

Thinking is the essence of human existence, unquestionably the highest product of human evolution. Yet it is not possible to convey coherently to students the sum and attainment of all humanity's knowledge. Students would be incapable of absorbing such an enormous quantity of knowledge (corresponding to current developments in individual academic…

A variety of practices and specialised representational systems are required to understand, communicate and construct molecular genetics knowledge. This study describes teachers' use of multimodal representations of molecular genetics concepts and how their strategies and choice of resources were interpreted, understood and used by students to…

Climate change is an important theme in the investigation of human-environment interactions in geographic education. This study explored the nature of students' understanding of concepts and processes related to climate change. Through semi-structured interviews, data was collected from 27 Secondary 3 (Grade 9) students from Singapore. The data…

Semiotic representations have been an important topic of study in mathematics education. Previous research implicitly placed more importance on the development of institutional representations of mathematical concepts in students rather than other types of representations. In the context of an extensive research project, in progress since 2005,…

Technological advances continue to reshape the skill sets necessary for students to succeed both in the classroom and in the workforce. The ability to communicate information verbally and graphically can be viewed as a necessary skill that should be developed in a secondary technology education curriculum (Silva, 2008). This article outlines a…

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…

This case study describes an "out of field" teacher's use of the Internet to teach a range of mathematical topics in a modified Year 8 mathematics class. It highlights the importance of three factors for implementing a discernible web-based teaching strategy: appropriate choice of web objects, effective "virtual" pedagogy, and technical support…

In the Walking Out Graphs Lesson described here, students experience several types of representations used to describe motion, including words, sentences, equations, graphs, data tables, and actions. The most important theme of this lesson is that students have to understand the consistency among these representations and form the habit of…

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…

Recursion is a central concept in computer science, yet it is difficult for beginners to comprehend. Israeli high-school students learn recursion in the framework of a special modular program in computer science (Gal-Ezer & Harel, 1999). Some of them are introduced to the concept of recursion in two different paradigms: the procedural…