Bias and prejudice are well known aspects of all societies and political arenas. They motivate a wide variety of fear-mongering policies and seem to be deeply ingrained in the hearts and minds of people, interfering with their reasoning and better judgement. In this paper, I explore how bias and prejudice come about and how they can be put to more…

As the smoke cleared from around the United States Capitol in January, the phrase "conspiracy theory" quickly became an epithet. However, history shows us that conspiracies do exist and have altered the course of history. Citizens, therefore, need the skills and dispositions to examine and intelligently assess the merits of conspiracies.…

This article explores how the philosophy for children (P4C) pedagogical model might be well positioned to support the educational strategies associated with the prevention of violent extremism, through early intervention in children's concept development. Specifically, it considers how the stereotyping of concepts risks interfering with children's…

The field of geography is important for any sustainability education. The aim of geography education is to enable students to understand the environment, its influence on human activity, and how humans influence the environment. In this article we present a study on how the interplay between the three pillars of sustainability thinking…

This paper revisits the scope of Catherine Malabou's thinking as a development of the ontological turn in continental philosophy. It puts this excursion of thinking alongside an account of education in modernity as the apotheosis of biopower. It aligns biopower, as manifest in education, as form of 'technological enframing'. In this it challenges…

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…

Research in genetics and genomics is advancing at a fast pace, and thus keeping up with the most recent findings and conclusions can be very challenging. At the same time these recent findings and conclusions have made necessary a reconceptualization of genes and heredity, both in science and in science education, beyond the mostly gene-centred…

Muslim communities in principally non-Muslim nation states (e.g. South Africa, United States of America, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands) established a plethora of Muslim theological institutions. They have done so with the purpose of educating and reinforcing their Muslim identity. These educational structures have given rise to numerous…

In this article Ira Socol explores the pros and cons of Paul Tough's "How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character." As Tough told Valerie Strauss, "The book is about two things: first, an emerging body of research that shows the importance of so-called non-cognitive skills in children's…

We have been developing a digital concept maps website (www.conceptmapsforlearning.com) based on the principles of effective assessment for learning. The purpose of this paper is to reveal its promising contributions to formative evaluation practices. The website reduces the workload of teachers as well as provides immediate and delayed feedback…

This paper discusses one step from the scientific method--that of identifying independent and dependent variables--from both scientific and mathematical perspectives. It begins by analyzing an episode from a middle school mathematics classroom that illustrates the need for students and teachers alike to develop a robust understanding of…

This is our fourth paper in our five paper series describing our national study of general education astronomy students' conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. While previous papers in this series focused on the processes by which we collected and quantitatively analyzed our data, this paper presents the most common pre-instruction…

In the context of existing "quantitative"/"qualitative" schisms, this paper briefly reminds readers of the current practice of testing for statistical significance in social science research. This practice is based on a widespread confusion between two conditional probabilities. A worked example and other elements of logical argument demonstrate…

Various studies suggest that covariational reasoning plays an important role on understanding the fundamental ideas of calculus and modeling dynamic functional events. The purpose of this study was to investigate a group of mathematics teachers' covariational reasoning abilities and predictions about their students. Data were collected through…

Numerous flash or java applet based simulations have been developed to improve students' comprehension of Science concepts, particularly the more complex or "dry" ones. Simulations have been reported to be effective as instructional aids in scaffolding scientific learning by students since simulations support the explication of implicit…