Sculpting representations of human organs out of modeling clay is an acknowledged method of teaching anatomical structures. Because of its potential to provide detailed spatial information, stereoscopic imagery can be understood to function as a suitable template for such sculpting tasks. Currently, it is unknown whether the advantages of…

This paper investigates the structure of German sixth-grade students' interest in science (N = 474; age 11-12 years) by considering different subject-related contexts (biology, chemistry, and physics) and different activities. Confirmatory factor analysis models were designed to validate the hypothetical structure of interest, connecting the whole…

Bird flight and lift in general is a complex subject which is also difficult to teach in a classroom. In order to support the teaching of this curriculum-based subject, an interactive exhibit to demonstrate aerodynamic aspects of objects has been developed, implemented and evaluated with 262 middle school students. The empirical evaluation…

The paper is an extended work from a previous study on Taiwanese and German students' conceptions of the universe (Liu, 2005). The study revealed that students discuss astronomical events and entities based on a mental model of universe and their models of the universe seem to have similar underlying principles with historical ones. In present…

Species identification tasks are a prerequisite for an understanding of biodiversity. Here, we focused on different educational materials to foster the identification of six European reptile species. Our educational training unit was based on natural plastic models of six species and pupils either used an illustrated identification book or a…