Students experience many difficulties learning the fundamental relationships in Newtonian mechanics, partly due to preexisting mental models that originate from their everyday lives. These preconceptions often persist even after instruction in mechanics and lead to a supposed incompatibility between physics lessons in school and personal…

Research in science education agrees that one of the key challenges of learners in the discipline is certainly connecting domain-specific representations to the underlying concepts. One way of supporting students to make applicable connections is using purposefully designed highlighting techniques in multimedia instructions. In order to examine…

Educational standards and instructional frameworks aim to foster students' scientific literacy, especially their conceptual knowledge. Previous research has examined several instructional approaches to foster students' conceptual learning. Reliable and adequate use of technical terms in science instruction is also essential for fostering students'…

The primary objective of the current project was to convey authentic science to students in out-of-school student laboratories. High school students have diverse and partially wrong concepts of scientists' work. To convey more realistic concepts, we developed videos of scientists working on relevant and up to date scientific topics. These videos,…

A number of studies on single instructional quality features have been reported for mathematics and science instruction. For summarizing single instructional quality features, researchers have created a model of three basic dimensions ("classroom management," "supportive climate," and "cognitive activation") of…

Establishing nuanced interpretations of student thinking is central to formative assessment but difficult, especially for preservice teachers. Learning progressions (LPs) have been proposed as a framework for promoting interpretations of students' thinking; however, research is needed to investigate whether and how an LP can be used to support…

This study investigated the effects of teachers' use of "focus questions" on students' knowledge structures and classroom teaching-learning process by re-analyzing selected data from a quasi-experimental pre-post video study (Wadouh, 2007). Focus questions are content-related anchoring questions highlighting the key content taught in…

Studies have shown the potential of explainer videos. An alternative is a written explanation, as found in science textbooks. Prior research suggests that instructional explanations sometimes lead to the belief that a topic has been fully understood, even though that is, not the case. This 'illusion of understanding' may be affected by the medium…

Both accurate monitoring and adequate control are crucial for effective self-regulation when learning from problem-solving tasks. Prior research has shown that self-regulated learning is especially harmful for low prior knowledge students, given their difficulties with accurate monitoring and control decisions. Although many studies have indicated…

The debate on the use of pesticides is very current in the public media when it comes to topics such as organic farming, bee mortality, and the use of glyphosate. The broad range of pesticide applications and their potential environmental impact makes pesticides an interesting topic for science education in general and for chemistry teaching in…

The German National Education Standards (NES) for biology were introduced in 2005. The content part of the NES emphasizes fostering conceptual knowledge. However, there are hardly any indications of what such an instructional implementation could look like. We introduce a theoretical framework of an instructional approach to foster students'…

Conceptual knowledge is a crucial tool for students to understand scientific phenomena. Knowledge about the structure and function of mental concepts potentially helps science educators to foster the acquisition of this tool. Specifically, the coherence of students' mental concepts is an intensely discussed issue within the related conceptual…

The use of ICT in science education offers many opportunities to promote students' learning and experimenting comprehensively. Considering that, it is important not simply to replace traditional media, but to explicitly identify the added value of ICT tools for students and teachers. Especially alternative forms of documenting experiments,…

For the last three decades, moderate constructivism has become an increasingly prominent perspective in science education. Researchers have defined characteristics of constructivist-oriented science classrooms, but the implementation of such science teaching in daily classroom practice seems difficult. Against this background, we conducted a…

The role of faculty in higher education as knowledge disseminators within the knowledge and digital society can be completely redefined. This paper presents results from a video-based flipped classroom approach combined with a project-oriented learning arrangement. I show that videos combined with a project-based learning setting can be a powerful…