This study investigates the progression of students' meaning-making of epigenetic phenomena while discussing multiple visual representations depicted at different levels of biological organization. Semi-structured focus group sessions involving ninth-grade students (aged 15-16) from a Swedish lower secondary school were video recorded. Students'…

The article presents a research study that examined the ways in which digital curation promotes personalized learning, as well as the students' experiences of this learning process. The study was conducted in the context of K-12 education. Participants spent three months on a project that included curating a personalized digital collection. The…

Multimedia students' dependence on information from the outside world can have an impact on their ability to identify and locate information from multiple resources in learning environments and thereby affect the construction of mental models. Field dependence-independence has been used to assess the ability to extract essential information from…

Research in chemistry education has revealed that students going through their undergraduate and graduate studies in organic chemistry have a fragmented conceptual knowledge of the subject. Rote memorization, rule-based reasoning, and heuristic strategies seem to strongly influence students' performances. There appears to be a gap between what we…

In this study, the effect of 3 cognitive variables such as logical thinking, field dependence/field independence, and convergent/divergent thinking on some specific students' answers related to the particulate nature of matter was investigated by means of probabilistic models. Besides recording and tabulating the students' responses, a combination…

Visualizations are an increasingly important part of scientific education and discovery. However, users often do not gain knowledge from them in a complete or efficient way. This article aims to direct research on visualizations in science education in productive directions by reviewing the evidence for widespread assumptions that learning styles,…

This study designed a chatbot system, Confucius, as a MSN virtual learning companion to examine how specific application design variables within educational software affect the learning process of subjects as defined by the cognitive continuum of field-dependent and field-independent learners. 104 college students participated in a 12 week…

The current review is concerned with an information processing model used in science education. The purpose is to summarise the current theoretical understanding, in published research, of a number of factors that are known to influence learning and achievement. These include field independence, working memory, long-term memory, and the use of…

Attempts to better understand scientific competence and how it is acquired. Interviews 10 associates at a company that produces unique technical products. Although none of the 10 had obtained degrees beyond high school, they all engaged in highly technical work that would be typical of practicing engineers. Associates describe their learning of…

Provides an introduction to cognitive, learning, and teaching styles and their educational use by describing two instruments used for cognitive style mapping the Oakland and Canfield approaches. (Author/GA)

A study of 147 Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners classified 57 subjects as independent problem finders. They were asked to select five of the 31 factors in Guilford's Structure of Intellect model which best described the process of choosing their research question. Implications for educating secondary science students are discussed. (VW)

Discusses learning modalities and learning styles in science education. Learning modalities characterize the way the brain takes in information (input) and restructures/expresses the information (output). Learning styles are ways that information is processed once it is obtained. Examples (including Kolb's "Learning-Style Inventory") are included.…

Introduces the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science, and Technology's (NCSSSMST) efforts to transform science, mathematics, and technology education. Describes a study led by the NCSSSMST Board of Directors that investigated whether Consortium schools meet the needs of their students and whether there were…

Reported is a study designed to investigate the convergent validity of the cognitive preference construct and to develop new techniques for analyzing cognitive preference data. The cognitive preference construct was invented to help evaluate the science curricula of the sixties based on the assumption that a student's intellectual approach to…

Human performance on verbal and spatial matching tasks was assessed every 15 minutes for eight hours. Significant 90- to 100-minute oscillations were observed for each task. It was also found that increases in performance on one task are accompanied by decreases on the other. (HM)