We report on an investigation of student thinking about steady-state pipe flow of an incompressible fluid. About 250 undergraduate engineering students were given a test consisting of two hydrodynamics questions, combining multiple-choice format with subsequent open-ended explanations. There is substantial evidence that students have difficulty…

Contrary to the situation at primary, middle, and secondary school levels, university science courses provide students with very few opportunities to reflect upon the nature of science (NOS). The first goal of this study was to provide evidence that the co-construction of evolutionary trees, an important component of university biology education,…

Learning about the nature of science is an important aspect of becoming part of the culture of practicing physicists. While these topics have a long-standing tradition in U.S. curricula they are currently not part of German educational standards or curricula. And while there is some research concerning primary and secondary school students'…

Green Tycoon is a free-of-charge game-based mobile application that embraces a systems thinking approach to introducing students to a biorefining process model within green chemistry. Players adopt the role of a manager in a chemical factory, synthesizing the fictional compound, Yorkanone. Through upgrading the system and engaging with the…

Research in organic chemistry education has revealed that students often rely on rote memorization when learning mechanisms. Not much is known about student productive resources for causal reasoning. To investigate incipient stages of student causal reasoning about single mechanistic steps of organic reactions, we developed a theoretical framework…

This paper aims to provide a contribution to the research in physics education regarding the interplay between mathematics and physics in teaching and learning physics at the university level. The argument is developed through a study focused on the historical case study of the blackbody that led Planck to make one of the most significant…

A growing body of scholarly work indicates that student performance on physics problems stems from many factors, including relevant conceptual understanding. However, in contexts in which significant conceptual difficulties have been documented via research, it can be difficult to pinpoint and isolate such factors because students' written and…

In the present article, the context-dependency of student reasoning is studied in a context of optics. We investigated introductory students' explanations about the behavior of light when different light sources, namely a small light bulb and a laser, were used in otherwise identical task assignments. The data was gathered with the aid of pretest…

This study reports the effects of an innovative introductory microbiology course for undergraduates that used a socioscientific issues (SSI)-based curriculum. The study illustrates how an SSI-based intervention provides learners with pragmatic opportunities for cultivating their scientific literacy subsuming the nature of science (NOS). Empirical…

Background: Problem-based learning (PBL) is a teaching approach working in cooperation with self-learning and involving research to solve real problems. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but that energy is conserved. Students had difficulty learning or misconceptions about this law. This study…