Teaching with analogies is an important pedagogy that helps learners construct abstract conceptions through reasoning with something familiar. Heat concepts were chosen for this study because they have an intangible nature and involve complex mechanisms that often challenge school-aged learners. Learning this kind of complex concept with analogies…

Abstract concepts dominate university science teaching, and much of this content is taught without sufficient connection to students' prior knowledge or everyday experiences. As this can be problematic for students, the aim of this research was to determine the utility and effectiveness of a professional development module on using analogies to…

This paper is a quasi-experimental investigation into the effectiveness of using analogy in teaching new and unfamiliar physics concepts to students enrolled in a British curriculum school in the United Arab Emirates. The students (N = 34) were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the control group (N = 17) following the traditional teaching…

The aim of this research was to analyze pre-service teachers' perceptions of the concept "scientific knowledge" through metaphors. Phenomenology, one of qualitative research designs, was used in the study. A total of 189 pre-service teachers, including 158 females and 31 males, studying at different departments in the education faculty…

Analogies have many advantages for students such as concretizing abstract concepts and enabling motivation. Analogies are frequently used in textbooks. Research shows that the analogies in textbooks are not used based on certain directives and sometimes lead to misconceptions for students. Therefore, analysing the analogies in textbooks on several…

Many studies have previously focused on how people with different levels of expertise solve physics problems. In early work, focus was on characterising differences between experts and novices and a key finding was the central role that propositionally expressed principles and laws play in expert, but not novice, problem-solving. A more recent…

Over the last 20 years, science education studies have reported that there are very different understandings among students of science regarding the key aspects of climate change. We used the cognitive linguistic framework of experientialism to shed new light on this valuable pool of studies to identify the conceptual resources of understanding…

Our objective is to contribute to the teaching of Classical Darwinian "Evolution" by means of a study of analogies and metaphors. Throughout the history of knowledge about "Evolution" and in Science teaching, tree structures have been used an analogs to refer to "Evolution," such as by Darwin in the "Tree of Life" passage contained in "On The…

Representational Momentum (RepMo) refers to the phenomenon that the vanishing position of a moving target is perceived as displaced ahead in the direction of movement. Originally taken to reflect a strict internalization of physical momentum, the finding that the target implied mass did not have an effect led to its subsequent reinterpretation as…

This paper deals with the features and design of explanations in public physics lectures. It presents the findings from a comparative study of three exemplary public physics lectures, given by practicing physicists who are acknowledged as excellent public lecturers. The study uses three different perspectives: the lecture, the lecturer, and the…