Purpose: This study explored the relationship of robotics activity with the development of conceptual understanding skills among secondary school students. Method: Forty-four sixteen-year-old Form 4 (Year 10) students in a fully government-aided school who have access to functioning LEGO-Mindstorms sets during physics lessons participated in the…

Science educators have long been concerned with how formal schooling contributes to learners' capacities to engage with science after school. This article frames productive engagement as fundamentally about the coordination of claims with evidence, but such coordination requires a number of reasoning capabilities to evaluate the strength of…

University and high school students not pursuing a science, technology, engineering, and/or mathematics (STEM) course of study demonstrate less developed scientific reasoning than their STEM-based peers. Previous studies show that the majority of non-STEM students can be classified as either concrete operational or transitional reasoners in…

The Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (LCTSR) was used to gauge the relative effectiveness of three different methods of pedagogy, "Reading, Presenting, and Questioning" (RPQ), "Experimenting and Discussion" (ED), and "Traditional Methods" (TM), on increasing students' level of scientific thinking. The…

The assimilation and synthesis of knowledge is essential for students to be successful in chemistry, yet not all students synthesize knowledge as intended. The study used the Learning Preference Checklist to classify students into one of three learning modalities--visual, auditory, or kinesthetic (VAK). It also used the Kolb Learning Style…

This study investigated the extent to which certain aspects of the structure of a learner's memory following instruction corresponded with the structure of the instructional material. Content structure was represented using digraph theory. The digraph analysis revealed a formal structure built substantially on six specific concepts. Cognitive…

The interview-about-instances technique was used to investigate the conceptual frameworks that 17 Form Four Southeast Asian students held about forces acting on an object at rest or in motion. Results show a number of alternate frameworks which are similar to those found in research conducted in western countries. (Author/JN)

This paper reports on research carried out in Sweden on concept formation as related to science education. Particular emphasis is given to the aquisition of the concepts of proportionality and density by tenth-grade students. Comparisons were made of the student's everyday thoughts about density and their ability to understand the Cartesian Diver…

This book is intended to give teachers and student teachers a better understanding of the thinking of adolescent students in science lessons and to indicate the difficulties such students have in understanding the more abstract or formal ideas with which they are presented. It is practical in its orientation as the issues discussed are illustrated…

Reported is an investigation of the development of children's thinking in relation to biological education, involving over 200 twelve-year-old students from five comprehensive British schools. While the students' ability to name animals was considered "good," they had trouble recognizing drawings of plants and their understanding of…

Proposes the use of conceptual discrepancies to stimulate student inquiry into scientific concepts. Provides a list of 20 examples of conceptual discrepancies from the biological sciences that have encouraged self-regulation in biology students. (Contains 12 references.) (MDH)

Identified some of the misconceptions held by secondary science students (N=232) related to selected ecological concepts and generalizations. Lists the alternative conceptions expressed by these students on food chains and energy flows and pyramids. Offers perspectives on dealing with the sources of the misconceptions. (ML)

Investigates effects of an independent variable (grade) on three dependent variables (membership, partial association, and generalization) describing preferential styles of thinking in 1635 pupils, measured by a 16 concept word test. (DS)

Discussed is the teaching of physics with an emphasis on the learning of concepts before problem solving. Examples of this approach are provided. (CW)

Explains the differences between successful and unsuccessful problem solvers' exploration of a problem, translation of information into different forms, approach to devising and executing a plan, and rechecking work. (RT)