Many authors stress the importance of basing teaching on students' prior knowledge. To build a bridge between students' everyday knowledge and scientific concepts, the role of metaphors and analogies came into the focus of the science education community during the past two decades. Approaches using metaphor-based teaching strategies often regard…

In this study, the purpose is to develop and illustrate a method that facilitates investigations of students' learning processes in classroom discussions about socioscientific issues. The method, called transactional argumentation analysis, combines a transactional perspective on meaning making based on John Dewey's pragmatic philosophy and an…

Presents the epistemology of scientific concepts from a schematic modeling perspective. Discusses students' initial cognitive states based on the level of commensurability between students' own concepts and their scientific counterparts. Contains 87 references. (DDR)