No scientific concept in the twenty-first century has garnered more attention from scholars outside the scientific community than the Anthropocene. Despite the official rejection by the geological community in March 2024 of the proposal for an Anthropocene Epoch as a formal unit of the Geological Time Scale, it is expected to remain an invaluable…

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…

General Chemistry serves virtually all STEM students. It has been accused of covering content in a "mile wide and inch deep" fashion. This has made it very difficult to assess, where chemistry educators have relied on assessments of specific topics. Assessing across all these different topics requires introducing many different chemical…

For decades, the case has been made for inquiry-based activities that enable teaching and learning of science concepts through the process of doing science. Laboratory courses provide a unique setting with opportunities for students to learn to ask questions, plan and carry out investigations, analyze data, and construct scientific arguments. Yet,…

This work aims to evaluate the evolution of chemical bonding concepts of high school students at public schools in southern Brazil. For this, we built the epistemological profile of each student who took part in a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) about this topic, based on the foundations of Bachelard's theory. Following the principles of the…

Existing accounts of student thinking about mechanical wave propagation and superposition emphasize that students sometimes treat wave pulses as objects, saying, for example, that pulses bounce off of one another when they meet. In this paper, we present a context in which students explicitly reason about pulses as not-objects, instead describing…

In a normal year approximately 3 months pass between students taking their final examinations in high school or college and beginning an undergraduate course in chemistry. In the months prior to those examinations, students will usually have undertaken an extensive period of revision and consolidation of the key concepts learned throughout their…

This paper examines where science fits within the early years foundation stage developmental framework and aims to create an understanding of common science practice within the early years, with particular focus on practice at Balham Nursery School and Children's Centre. Within the paper both theory and a range of practical examples are…

With support from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), a community of biochemistry and molecular biology (BMB) scientist-educators has developed and administered an assessment instrument designed to evaluate student competence across four core concept and skill areas fundamental to BMB. The four areas encompass…

An assessment was developed using entries from the macromolecular Crystallographic Information File that was given to students in an upper level bioinformatics class at the end of the semester during a 2½ hour time period. Although all students completed the same questions, they were assessed on an individual protein they had worked on during the…

It is widely agreed upon that the goal of science education is building a scientifically literate society. Although there are a range of definitions for science literacy, most involve an ability to problem solve, make evidence-based decisions, and evaluate information in a manner that is logical. Unfortunately, science literacy appears to be an…

We analyze results from paired pre- and post-instruction administration of the Mechanics Baseline Test to 2238 students in introductory mechanics classes. We investigate pairs of specific wrong answers given with unusual frequency by students on the pretest. We also identify transitions between pre- and post-test answers on the same question which…

In this reply to Elon Langbeheim's response to an article recently published in this journal, authors Smith and Villarreal identify several types of general chemistry students' misconceptions concerning the concept of particle position during physical change. They focus their response on one of the misconceptions identified as such: Given a solid…

Reading the interesting article "Discerning selective traditions in science education" by Per Sund, which is published in this issue of "CSSE," allows us to open the discussion on procedures for teaching science today. Clearly there is overlap between the teaching of science and other areas of knowledge. However, we must…

Focus of this article is the current situation characterized by students' de-rootedness and possible measures to improve the situation within the frame of education for sustainable development. My main line of argument is that science teachers can practice teaching in such a way that students are brought in deeper contact to the environment. I…