As engineering learning experiences increasingly begin in elementary school, elementary teacher preparation programs are an important site for the study of teacher development in engineering education. In this article, we argue that the stances that novice teachers adopt toward engineering learning and knowledge are consequential for the…

Concept map activities often lack a subsequent revision step that facilitates knowledge integration. This study compares two collaborative critique activities using a Knowledge Integration Map (KIM), a form of concept map. Four classes of high school biology students (n?=?81) using an online inquiry-based learning unit on evolution were assigned…

The forecast for the first quarter of this century is that the issue of teaching science in the language to which the learner is most familiar will receive more attention in our quest to win more students for science. Over two-thirds of countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe have developed policies on the use of the mother tongue for teaching…

This is a mix methods follow-up study in which we reconfirm the findings from an earlier study [Vedder-Weiss & Fortus [2011] "Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 48(2)", 199-216]. The findings indicate that adolescents' declining motivation to learn science, which was found in many previous studies [Galton [2009] "Moving to…

Asks the question, Can the learning cycle also be applied effectively to science text? High school students (n=23) were tested for reasoning ability then randomly assigned to read either a learning-cycle or traditional-text passage. Students who read the learning-cycle passage earned higher scores on concept comprehension questions at all…

Prior research in both education and cognitive science has identified analogy making as a powerful tool for explanation as well as a fundamental mechanism for facilitating an individual's construction of knowledge. While a considerable body of research exists focusing on the role analogy plays in learning science concepts, relatively little is…

Describes a study of the similarities and differences in graph-related interpretations between scientists and college students engaged in collective graph interpretation. Concludes that while many students learned to provide correct answers to scientific graphing questions, they did not come to make linguistic distinctions or increase their…