To introduce the randomness of a physical process to students, a chaotic pendulum experiment was opened in East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST) on the undergraduate level in the physics department. It was shown chaotic motion could be initiated through adjusting the operation of a chaotic pendulum. By using the data of the…

China is one of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters. Chinese students' awareness and understanding about global warming have a significant impact on the future of mankind. This study, as an initial research of this kind in Mainland China, uses clinical interviews to survey 37 grade eight students on their understanding about global…

In the past three decades, previous researches showed that students had various misconceptions of Newton's Third Law. The present study focused on students' difficulties in identifying the third-law force pair in gravity interaction situations. An instrument involving contexts with gravity and non-gravity associated interactions was designed and…

This paper presents a revised learning progression for the energy concept and initial findings on diverse progressions among subgroups of sample students. The revised learning progression describes how students progress towards an understanding of the energy concept along two progress variables identified from previous studies--key ideas about…

The research reported here investigated the everyday and scientific repertoires of children involved in semi-structured, Piagetian interviews carried out to check their understanding of dynamic astronomical concepts like daytime and night-time. It focused on the switching taking place between embedded and disembedded thinking; on the imagery which…

This article describes the development and validation of an instrument that can be used for content analysis of inquiry-based tasks. According to the theories of educational evaluation and qualities of inquiry, four essential functions that inquiry-based tasks should serve are defined: (1) assisting in the construction of understandings about…

Climate change is not local; it is global. This means that many environmental issues related to climate change are not geographically limited and hence concern humans in more than one location. There is a growing body of research indicating that today's increased climate change is caused by human activities and our modern lifestyle. Consequently,…

Based on the constructive theory, about 300 college students of grade 05 of the electronic information specialty of Dezhou University are surveyed for their alternative frameworks of particle mechanics in college physics in this article. In the survey, the questionnaires are used to find out college students' alternative frameworks, and the…

As the breadth and depth of economic reforms increase in China, growing attention is being paid to equalities in opportunities to learn science by students of various backgrounds. In early 2009, the Chinese Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology jointly sponsored a national survey of urban eighth-grade students' science…

The development of children's cosmologies was investigated over a 13-year period, using multi-modal, in-depth interviews with 686 children (217 boys, 227 girls from New Zealand and 129 boys, 113 girls from China), aged 2-18. Children were interviewed while they "observed" the apparent motion of the Sun and Moon, and other features of the…