In STEM education, the engineering design process serves as a pedagogical strategy to connect science and mathematics concepts. While STEM approaches are increasingly favored in science courses, the role of mathematics in integrated STEM activities is often overlooked, despite its foundational importance across STEM disciplines. This manuscript…

Reflection plays a critical role in learning. Game-based learning environments have significant potential to elicit and support student reflection by prompting learners to think critically about their own learning processes and performance. Stealth assessment models, used for unobtrusively assessing student competencies from evidence of game…

There is a disconnect between neuroscience research on concept learning and representation (focusing on categories of concrete objects), and concept learning challenges in science education (which concern systems of causal relationships among objects and events). Bridging this gap will both inform theories of science learning and expand our…

The gamification of learning has increased in popularity in recent years as a tool for enhancing student engagement and attainment. In undergraduate chemistry courses, hybridization is a fundamental concept that students need to master in order to understand introductory organic and inorganic topics. This study focused on the development of a card…

This paper uses evidence-centered assessment design (ECD) to structure and analyze a laboratory activity where students collect and represent titration curve data to determine acid strength in terms of molarity and dissociation constant. Following principles of multidimensional learning, the activity prompts students to demonstrate knowledge of…

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…

A new didactical approach named "Learning by Being" (LBB) is proposed and its correlation with current educational paradigms in science teaching is analysed. The key idea in LBB is the assumption by the students of cognitive goals, and three components are mandatory in LBB: a) student's personal learning effort, b) student-teacher mutual…

This article deals with science content "in the making" and in particular the role of the body in producing scientific phenomena. While accounts of scientists' work have repeatedly demonstrated, how producing phenomena requires immense amounts of time and effort, involving tinkering and manual labor, this is a little empirically studied…

Community-campus engagement (CCE) offers transformative opportunities for collaborative knowledge creation. Over the last few decades, thoughtful energy has gone into identifying the parts of a CCE and then developing tools to study these parts, with discrete focus on community groups, students, and faculty. Bringing a complexity science approach…

The relationship between teaching and learning is a most central issue in education research, but it is yet to be fully understood. Variation Theory provides an explanatory account for teaching and learning and offers a specific view on what it means to learn: to discriminate and to discern critical aspects of the object of learning. This paper…

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…

In response to the authors, I demonstrate how threshold concepts offer a means to both contextualise teaching and learning of quantum physics and help transform students into the culture of physics, and as a way to identify particularly troublesome concepts within quantum physics. By drawing parallels from my own doctoral research in another area…

To investigate the relationship between context and concept we have constructed a conceptual learning path in which students reinvent the concept of energy conservation and embedded this path in two authentic practices. A comparison of the expected learning outcome with actual student output for the most important steps in the learning path gives…

In this commentary, I build on recent interdisciplinary models for embodied cognition with additional perspectives from affective neuroscience, educational psychology, creativity theory, and science education. I invoke William James and John Dewey, pioneers of an embodied philosophy of mind, alongside recent affective neuroscience theory about the…

This paper explores strategies for teachers to work with science conceptions, both those consistent and those inconsistent with western science understanding. It emphasises the value of teachers checking their own and their students' prior understanding of concepts to be learnt. A past approach of educators has been to replace old beliefs with new…