Big ideas, sometimes referred to as key, core, fundamental or threshold concepts, are widely applicable concepts at the heart of disciplines that are or have been central and influential for their fields. Attention here is particularly directed to meta-concepts common to sister disciplines in the sciences. "Learning thresholds",…

Spatial skills, which represent the ability to mentally manipulate objects (Schneider & McGrew, 2012; Atit et al., 2020) have been shown to be correlated with entrance, persistence and success in STEM (Shea et al., 2001; Wai et al., 2009). Specifically, these skills have been shown to be necessary to geologists and geoscientists (Hegarty,…

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…

Small private online courses (SPOCs) have influenced teaching and learning in China's higher education. Learning management systems (LMSs) are important components in SPOCs. They can collect various data related to student behavior and support pedagogical interventions. This research used feature engineering and nearest neighbor smoothing models…

This book presents a wide range of international perspectives that explore the different ways the diverse forms of drama supports learning in science. It illustrates how learning science by adopting and adapting theatrical techniques can offer more inclusive ways for students to relate to scientific ideas and concepts. The theatrical processes by…

International comparative studies of education have shown that the increase in mathematical attainment differs significantly among students in relation to the different school types in which their mathematical foundations were acquired. In tertiary education, the same differences are observed with respect to simple tasks that relate to the subject…

The purpose of this phenomenographic study is to examine students' knowledge progression in a three-year Bachelor program in Business Administration. Theoretical sampling was used to select nine students from a group of 200 university students admitted to the program. The students were interviewed on three occasions: Year 1, after their Management…

Universities in the English-speaking world share a common ancestry that extends back to medieval times. From these beginnings universities quickly developed distinctive qualities as they became integrated within different social and cultural systems of their home societies. A number of comparisons of higher education research have shown major…

In this study, we reviewed 76 journal articles on employing drawing assessment as a research tool in science education. Findings from the systematic review suggest four justifications for using drawing as a type of research tool, including assessment via drawing as (a) an alternative method considering young participants' verbal or writing…

Critical thinking pedagogy is misguided. Ostensibly a cure for narrowness of thought, by using the emotions appropriate to conflict, it names only one mode of relation to material among many others. Ostensibly a cure for fallacies, critical thinking tends to dishonesty in practice because it habitually leaps to premature ideas of what the object…

In the complex and diverse region of Oceania, researchers often work across more than one cultural understanding. Thus, a researcher's position with regard to their research requires careful ongoing negotiation because position, when understood through relationality, is fluid. Negotiating position requires acute reflexivity of the researcher but…

Creativity is one of the important skills of the twenty-first century and central to higher education (HE). When we look closer into research on creativity in HE, however, it is not clear how university teachers conceptualise student creativity. How do teachers grasp, observe and express student creativity? Different methods such as interviews and…

Students' informal inferential reasoning (IIR) is often inconsistent with the normative logic underlying formal statistical methods such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), even after instruction. In two experiments reported here, student's IIR was assessed using an intuitive ANOVA task at the beginning and end of a statistics course. In both…

Although university students are key participants in knowledge-making processes, their insights about learning are sparsely documented, and too rarely considered in contemporary conversations in higher education. In centering the insights and experiences of students enrolled in two women's studies courses at the University of Maryland, this…

Learning is analyzed into two components, monitoring and strategy learning, using a technique that avoids the confounding of the Durling and Schick method. A strategy analysis showed that most subjects employed the same strategy across problems. Strategy shifters displayed a small tendency toward more efficient strategies. (Author/GK)