Concept mapping is widely used as a tool for assessing students' understanding of science. To fully realize the diagnostic potential of concept mapping, a scoring method that not only provides an objective and accurate assessment of students' drawn concept maps but also provides a detailed understanding of students' proficiency and deficiencies in…

In this study, we investigated how students organized their knowledge about organic chemistry reactions in a transformed curriculum, including their choices, abilities, and changes over time. This transformed curriculum focuses on interpreting the underlying mechanistic patterns of chemical reactions and emphasizes the principles of reactivity in…

Task orientation is currently a prominent concept under discussion in primary school didactics. It focuses on tasks along which pupils acquire competences on distinct levels of competence. The qualitative empirical study TAPSE (Textbook Analysis in Primary Science Education) pursues the question which conception of task orientation is present in…

This article offers a qualitative analysis of infrastructural in/justice in a community-partnered design intervention focused on developing high-tech low-cost Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) projects. We examined the kinds of infrastructural injustices that were present in three afterschool programs and how it shaped STEAM…

Students' difficulties in interpreting what counts as knowledge have been addressed in past research on science education. The implementation of progressivist pedagogy in terms of more student-active classroom practice and the introduction of a variety of discourses into the science classroom deepens students' difficulties. The integration of…

Many countries, including the United States, emphasize the importance of developing students' scientific habits of mind and their capacity to think deeply about scientific ideas in an integrated fashion. Recent science education policies in the United States portray a related vision of science teaching and learning that is meant to guide the…

This article evaluates a validity argument for the degree to which assessment tasks are able to provide evidence about knowledge that fuses information from a progression of core disciplinary ideas in ecology and a progression for the scientific practice of developing evidence-based explanations. The article describes the interpretive framework…

Although taxonomic proficiency is a prerequisite for understanding ideas central to biology, previous research has established that learners frequently misclassify animals by not following the tenets of accepted taxonomic rubrics. This has immediate relevance with the recently revised English National Curriculum now requiring concepts of animal…

The importance of "size and scale" in nanoscience and engineering has been recognized by both scientists and science educators. A solid understanding of this concept is key to the learning of nanoscience. Students, however, have been reported to have considerable difficulty grasping this concept; yet little is known regarding their state…

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…

Except for grade one students, urban and suburban students used similar properties to classify illustrations of bottles containing different amounts of colored liquids. Only in the urban children was there a change in type of property used between grades one and three. (AL)

Describes the techniques used to develop tests for administration to groups of students who cannot read and write. Photographic transparencies coordinated with audio-tape are used. Tabulates reliability and other data for tests designed for the Science-A Process Approach program. (AL)

Discusses findings of a study designed to achieve two goals: (1) determine the affect of peer collaboration on high school biology students' acquisition of concepts related to photosynthesis, and (2) examine interactions in a collaborative peer group situation to determine how these interactions relate to the development of concepts associated…

There is a chasm in our knowledge of the relationship that exists between reading-writing and scientific literacy. This article was written with the intent of stimulating research on writing and reading to learn science. (ZWH)

A 2x3x2 factorial design was used to study the effects of sex, verbalization of concepts by students, and information supplied by other students" or teachers" or performance in a multiple classification seriation task by fourth grade students. There was a significant interaction of sex and information source. (AL)