The learners' conceptual understanding has become one of the leading research areas conducted by educational researchers. Both students and current educators should actively work to improve their understanding of alternative conceptions and deepen their conceptual knowledge. One of the essential concepts in chemistry learning is colligative…

Visual images are widely used in science textbooks to facilitate the understanding of abstract concept of light. This study aims to compare and analyze elementary school textbooks from Korea, the United States, and Japan, focusing on how visual images are utilized to effectively convey light-related content. The findings reveal that all three…

Over the years, there have been various calls to increase and better represent astronomy in curricula. This is motivated by views within the astronomy and astronomy education communities that the awe, wonder, and interdisciplinary nature of astronomy has the potential to engage students in STEM across disciplines. Reviews of curricula have shown…

This study examines the contribution of the knowledge produced in educational administration doctoral theses to the functions of science, concept and model development, theory formation, scale development/adaptation and application. Content analysis, one of the qualitative methods, was used in conducting the research, which analyzed 122 doctoral…

Recently Burkholder "et al." argued that class normalized gains over the entire population of courses is approximated by a Cauchy distribution, not by a normal distribution, and therefore should not be used to compare different classes because means and standard deviations cannot be calculated. They argued that multiple linear regression…

Interactive simulations allow students to discover the underlying principles of a scientific phenomenon through their own exploration. Unfortunately, students often struggle to learn effectively in these environments. Classifying students' interaction data in the simulations based on their expected performance has the potential to enable adaptive…

Scientific reasoning ability is essential to get developed in the current digital age, particularly in the process of judgement and decision-making in complex problems. Few studies have conducted an in-depth exploration of scientific reasoning ability, especially in relation to the confidence level and gender. The scientific reasoning ability of…

Ishimoto, Davenport, and Wittmann have previously reported analyses of data from student responses to the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE), in which they used item response curves (IRCs) to make claims about American and Japanese students' relative likelihood to choose certain incorrect responses to some questions. We have used an…

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…

The solving of problems in biochemistry often uses concepts from multiple disciplines such as chemistry and biology. Chemical identity (CI) is a foundational concept in the field of chemistry, and the knowledge, thinking, and practices associated with CI are used to answer the following questions: "What is this substance?" and "How…

Momentum is a foundational concept in physics. Although it is often taught in introductory mechanics courses, there are a limited number of studies on this topic in the literature. The results from these studies have consistently shown that students have difficulties in understanding momentum, especially the connections between net force, time,…

Organic chemistry students at two universities, one in Canada and the other in the United States, connected using video conferencing software as learning partners for six online collaborative assignments. Mixed-methods analysis of interviews, surveys, and student-written reflections was used to identify barriers that students encountered during…

In this study, we explore how cross-linguistic differences can contribute to children's scientific thinking. We compared first and third grade Chinese students' pre-instructional ideas of the earth expressed in clinical interviews with that of their English-speaking and Greek-speaking counterparts (as recorded in the literature). Inspired by a…

Teachers of students with visual impairments play an integral role in supporting both students with visual impairments and general education teachers so that students can access the curriculum, including science-related topics (Anderson, 2009; Bogner et al., 2011; Wild & Koehler, 2017). Wild and Koehler (2017) identify six responsibilities of…

As China and the United States become the top two carbon emitters in the world, it is crucial for citizens in both countries to construct a sophisticated understanding of energy consumption issues. This interview study examines how U.S. and Chinese students compare in explaining and arguing about two critical energy consumption issues: burning…