The study aims to learn that they want to reflect on their reflective thoughts and reveal how they reflect what they have learned. Reflective thinking, one of the higher-order thinking skills, enables students to learn more easily and permanently. Students with high reflective thinking skills will be more successful both in their academic and…

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…

This study explored online mentoring dialogues of first-year science teachers (FYSTs) to construct a model that was informed by metaphors in teaching dilemmas. Nine teachers' yearlong threaded dialogues were archived and first analyzed by Windschitl's (2002) four dilemma categories, and later by Lakoff and Johnson's (2003) conceptual metaphor…

To improve understanding of identities and inverses, and to provide a stronger foundation for future mathematics, Sandra Miles designed a two-part lesson that makes the relationship between identities and inverses explicit. This article illustrates Miles' teaching of the first part of the lesson, focused on addition and subtraction, and then gives…

Chemistry as a discipline in general incorporates abstract concepts, which should be visualized through experiment- and application-oriented methods. It is a well-known fact in Turkey that chemistry class offered by simple and traditional methods cannot be understood by students at a satisfactory level. Such chemical subjects as atoms, molecules,…

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 article presents a study focused on analysing the effectiveness of an activity about the use of analogies in science communication. The activity consisted of reading two science articles published in a prestigious digital newspaper about the first image of a black hole. The purpose was (i) to identify and analyse the analogies used in the…

Many geoscience phenomena cannot be perceived at human temporal or spatial scales. As a consequence, we can only understand many processes that drive geological phenomena through analogical reasoning. Building deep conceptual understanding requires instruction that activates the appropriate source analogs and allows students to build useful…

According to general relativity (GR), we live in a four-dimensional curved universe. Since the human mind cannot visualize those four dimensions, a popular analogy compares the universe to a two-dimensional rubber sheet distorted by massive objects. This analogy is often used when teaching GR to upper secondary and undergraduate physics students.…

The hybridization of carbon is an important problem of quantum chemistry. It means that atomic orbitals could mix giving hybrid orbitals. Orbitals are not physical objects; they are mathematical solutions of the Schrodinger equation. The aim of this study is to determine through phenomenographic method how Science Teaching undergraduate students…

Narrative in science learning has become an important field of inquiry. Most applications of narrative are extrinsic to science--such as when they are used for creating affect and context. Where they are intrinsic, they are often limited to special cases and uses. To extend the reach of narrative in science, a hypothesis of narrative framing of…

In this commentary, the author presents his thoughts on two papers appearing in this special issue. The first, "The Importance of Language in Students' Reasoning about Heat in Thermodynamic Processes," by David T. Brookes and Eugenia Etkina (See: EJ1060728), and the second, "Varying Use of Conceptual Metaphors Across Levels of…

This special issue of "International Journal of Science Education" is based on the theme "Conceptual Metaphor and Embodied Cognition in Science Learning." The idea for this issue grew out of a symposium organized on this topic at the conference of the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA) in September 2013.…

The role of analogies and metaphors has played a significant part in the work on teaching and learning science. This commentary discusses three papers from this current issue that cover a wide range of studies in the spirit of conceptual metaphors--ranging from a study somewhat similar to "classical" conceptual change, to a teacher…

Research in genetics and genomics is advancing at a fast pace, and thus keeping up with the most recent findings and conclusions can be very challenging. At the same time these recent findings and conclusions have made necessary a reconceptualization of genes and heredity, both in science and in science education, beyond the mostly gene-centred…