This study established whether 12 South African secondary school physics students had incorrect conceptions of basic magnetism and if they had, to what extent they consistently applied such conceptions. Different scenarios in the form of thought experiments were presented in a clinical interview approach. A complex systems perspective underpinned…

The first phase of this multiphase study involves modeling of college students' thinking of friction at the microscopic level. Diagnostic interviews were conducted with 11 students with different levels of physics backgrounds. A phenomenographic approach of data analysis was used to generate categories of responses which subsequently were used to…

While a vast body of research has identified difficulties in students' understanding about forces and acceleration and their related alternative conceptions, far less research suggests ways to use students' alternative conceptions to enhance conceptual understanding of a specific fundamental concept. This study focused on distinguishing between…

This study presents a series of three experiments that focus on how distributed scaffolding influences learners' conceptual understanding and reasoning from combined levels of triangulation, at the interactive level (discourses within a focus group) and the collective level (class). Three inquiry lessons on plate tectonics (LPT) were designed,…

This study focuses on second-year university students' explanations and reasoning related to adiabatic compression of an ideal gas. The phenomenon was new to the students, but it was one which they should have been capable of explaining using their previous upper secondary school knowledge. The students' explanations and reasoning were…

The "National Science Education Standards" emphasize teaching unifying concepts and processes such as basic functions of living organisms, the living environment, and scale (NRC 2011). Scale includes understanding that different characteristics, properties, or relationships within a system might change as its dimensions are increased or decreased…

In physics teacher education, two central goals are first to learn the structures of physics knowledge, and second the processes of its construction. To know the structure is to know the framework of concepts and laws; to know the processes is to know where the knowledge comes from, how the framework is constructed, and how it can be justified.…