To be able to support students' competence development in solving physics problems over the course of a lesson series effectively, teachers need a proper appreciation of students' deficiencies. As teachers commonly assess students' competence by means of written tests, teachers are challenged to interpret students' work on these tests and to…

This paper addresses a problem that greatly complicates the implementation of dialogic educational approaches in schools: the dilemma between driving children's talk towards normatively accepted conceptions and, at the same time, avoiding the introduction of these normative conceptions into the dialogue by the teacher. I argue that this dilemma is…

Coordination class theory has proven to be a useful theoretical framework for describing processes of conceptual change in certain physical and mathematical concepts. Its development throughout different studies has allowed us to understand numerous mechanisms of conceptual learning by individual subjects. There have been attempts to implement…

There is growing interest in implementing reform-based lab courses in undergraduate physics that are student driven rather than instructor driven. In these courses, students develop and carry out experiments while simultaneously reasoning about their hypotheses, data collection procedures, collected evidence, and the relevant physics content.…

A central goal of science education reform is for students to participate in scientific sense making rather than to merely acquire science facts. However, even in classrooms utilizing reform-based pedagogies, students are typically allowed to construct knowledge only insofar as they construct expected knowledge. In this report and reflection, we…

Student-generated videos are growing in popularity in education generally, and in chemistry education there are several reports emerging on their use in practice. Interest in their use in chemistry is grounded in the visual nature of chemistry, the role of laboratory work in chemistry, and a desire to enhance digital literacy skills. In this…

Students come to science class with many ideas of how the natural world works, some of which do not match the consensus of the scientific community and can lead to misunderstandings. Because a growing body of educational research indicates that these misconceptions can serve as resources for learning, we developed a four-point plan to leverage…

Chemistry is traditionally perceived as difficult to comprehend. Its mastery requires that a variety of concepts be linked to form an organized knowledge system. The connections need to be made not only between the concepts associated with the macroscopic level of the chemistry triplet but also between the submicroscopic and symbolic levels. Many…

The International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) launched a global project in 2017 to infuse systems thinking into chemistry education, motivated in part by the desire to help equip chemists and citizens to better address the complex, global challenges our society currently faces. One important early outcome of the IUPAC Systems…

Learners underperform in stoichiometry as they lack conceptual reasoning of the underlying concepts and the ability to solve stoichiometric problems. Therefore, it was necessary to determine if there is a statistical correlation between problem-solving skills and conceptual reasoning in stoichiometry and if so, whether one can significantly…

The goal of this paper is to introduce an explicit protocol that preservice science teachers can use to improve the quality of the scaffolding (written and oral prompts) of their inquiry lessons. Scaffolding is an essential component of effective inquiry lessons because it keeps students focused on the target science content and divides the…

The aim of this article is to investigate how new materialist philosophies of matter can help us study the emergence of scientific thought in young children's activities. We draw extensively on the work of Gilles Deleuze to help us understand scientific concepts as concrete universals. In particular, we show how the concept of force is re-animated…

We report some of the common, prevalent conceptual resources that students used to reason about energy, based on our analysis of written responses to questions given to 807 introductory physics students. These resources include, for example, associating forms of energy with indicators, relating forces and energy, and representing energy…

The concept of matter, especially its particulate nature, is acknowledged as being one of the key concept areas in learning science. Within the framework of learning studies and variation theory, and with results from science education research as a starting point, six lower secondary school science teachers tried to enhance students'…

Background and purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate and identify the nature and the interrelatedness of pre-service teachers' misconceptions and scientific concepts for explaining dissolving before, during, and after a 5E learning cycle lesson on dissolving, the intervention. Sample, design, and methods: Guided by Vygotsky's…