Most chemistry students struggle with interpreting and understanding NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectra and the general concepts of NMR spectroscopy. NMR spectroscopy seems to be difficult to both teach and learn. Therefore, the corresponding courses should be investigated in more detail. We conducted a survey with N = 39 German university…

This article reports on the development and piloting of a German version of a concept test to assess students' conceptual knowledge of density. The concept test was administered in paper-pencil format to 222 German secondary school students as a post-test after instruction in all relevant concepts of density. We provide a psychometric…

Phylogenetic trees are important tools for teaching and understanding evolution, yet students struggle to read and interpret them correctly. In this study, we extend a study conducted by Catley and Novick (2008) by investigating depictions of evolutionary trees in US textbooks. We investigated 1197 diagrams from 11 German and 11 United States…

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…

Smartphone-based experimental exercises were incorporated as part of the homework problems in an introductory mechanics course at a university. A quasi-experimental field study with two cohorts design was performed to measure the impact of such exercises on motivation, interest and conceptual understanding. The empirical results on learning…

Pre-service physics teachers often do not recognise the relevance for their future career in their university content knowledge courses. A lower perceived relevance can, however, have a negative effect on their motivation and on their academic success. Several intervention studies have been undertaken with the goal to increase this perceived…

Many geoscience phenomena cannot be perceived at human temporal or spatial scales. As a consequence, we can only understand many processes that drive geological phenomena through analogical reasoning. Building deep conceptual understanding requires instruction that activates the appropriate source analogs and allows students to build useful…

Collaboration is regarded as one of the core competences of the 21st century when it comes to complex problem solving. In response to high dropout rates among STEM students, we developed a digital-collaborative intervention on a difficult topic, MO theory, for first-year chemistry students. First, students work independently in a Digital Learning…

The goal of this study is to investigate the effect of self-generation in inquiry-based learning and to identify the role of feedback. While open-ended inquiry-based learning with a high degree of self-generation requirements has long been considered optimal for facilitating effective learning, its long-run effects have been critically challenged.…

In science, graphs are used to visualise data, relationships and scientific principles. Basic graph reading operations, i.e. reading single data points, recognising trends as well as conducting small extrapolations from the data are important skills for pupils and lay the groundwork for a comprehensive understanding of data visualisations across…

Background: Education Standards highlight the importance of conceptual knowledge. Instructional tasks play a key role in biology instruction and offer learning opportunities for students. Tasks contain of a content and a demands part. Therefore, complexity and cognitive level are adequate variables to describe tasks and are assumed effective for…

Nowadays, outreach labs are important informal learning environments in science education. After summarizing research to goals outreach labs focus on, we describe our evidence-based gene technology lab as a model of a research-driven outreach program. Evaluation-based optimizations of hands-on teaching based on cognitive load theory (additional…