One of the goals of college-level introductory biology is to establish a foundation of knowledge and skills that can be built upon throughout a biology curriculum. In a reformed introductory biology course, we used iterative model construction as a pedagogical tool to promote students' understanding about conceptual connections, particularly those…

Chemistry courses remain a challenge for many undergraduate students. In particular, first-semester organic chemistry has been labeled as a gatekeeper with high attrition rates, especially among students of color. Our study examines a key factor related to conceptual understanding in science and predictive of course outcomes-knowledge structures.…

Diverse implicit cognitive elements seem to support but also constrain reasoning in different domains. Many of these cognitive constraints can be thought of as either implicit assumptions about the nature of things or reasoning heuristics for decision-making. In this study we applied this framework to investigate college students' understanding of…

With applications of Tree of Life data becoming ever more prevalent in everyday contexts, tree thinking has emerged as a vital component of scientific literacy. This article reports a study testing the hypothesis that instruction in natural selection, which is the primary focus of US evolution education at the high school and introductory college…

The purpose of this study was to investigate Ethiopian physics undergraduate students' conceptual change in the concepts of electric potential and energy (EPE) and electromagnetic induction (EMI). A quasi-experimental design was used to study the effect of cognitive perturbation using physics interactive simulations (CPS) in relation to cognitive…

In this study we explore the strategies that undergraduate and graduate chemistry students use when engaged in classification tasks involving symbolic and microscopic (particulate) representations of different chemical reactions. We were specifically interested in characterizing the basic features to which students pay attention when classifying…

College freshmen chemistry students who performed best on the course examinations possessed both relevant facts and relevant subsuming concepts. This conclusion supports Ausubel's theory of learning. The presence of facts unorganized by subsumers had little facilitating effect on learning of new materials. (AL)

Presents procedures, results, and conclusions of a study to see if psychological relations of association and similarity are consistent with a model to account for learned relations among concepts by college physics majors. The role of these relations in evaluating conceptual knowledge is dismissed. (DS)

Determined effects of various methods and formats on subjects' (N=253) responses to a Piagetian reasoning problem requiring control of variables. Results indicate that format but not method of task administration influences subjects' performance and that the influence is similar for various combinations of methods and format. (Author/JN)

Presents rationale and methods of using a hierarchical analysis to validate the use of randomized multiple choice test items. Concludes that solving randomized multiple choice problems require the same or similar cognitive processes or problem solving skills as a free response form. (DS)

This study aims at giving a systematic description of the cognitive activities involved in teaching physics. The most important conclusion from the results is that teaching by experienced university teachers can be described in terms of instruction processes belonging to the two-dimensional model described in this study. (PR)

Preservice physics teachers in a British university completed a word association test by supplying five physical quantities which they associated with a number of electromagnetic stimulus concepts. Gives analysis of concept linking as it may occur in the students' cognitive structures. (MLH)

Students enrolled in an introductory, audio-tutorial biology course were randomly assigned to either the control group, which followed the regular program and took pre and posttests designed for this study, or to the experimental group, which followed an identical program with additional exercises specially designed to teach higher cognitive…

Investigates and presents evidence concerning the construct validity of the Test of Higher Cognitive Learning in Chemistry (THCLC), a 40-item multiple-choice test developed to provide assessment of first semester introductory college chemistry students' higher cognitive skills. (Author/GA)

Determined if providing feedback to students had any impact on the correlation between performance in physics and a test of simple, mechanistic mathematics skills. Also determined if students who drop out of the physics course demonstrated any identifiable difference in performance on tests involving a variety of reasoning and problem-solving…