The topic of the seasons is covered in both primary and secondary schools in Australia. It may be difficult for some students to comprehend how the Sun alters its position throughout the year. This article shows how to calculate the changing rising and setting positions of the Sun for one's locality and the extremes of its elevation near noon over…

Collaboration is often emphasized as one of the key twenty-first century competencies to promote scientific literacies through many representational modes. However, collaborative interactions have been often characterized as a coordinated, synchronous, and symmetrical activity in terms of the same level of knowledge with little attention paid…

This study was aimed to investigate the effectiveness of augmented reality and modeling-based teaching in the "Solar System and Eclipses" unit. The pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design model was used in this study. For three weeks, the "Solar System and Eclipses" unit of the Science course was taught to the experimental…

Research related to the teaching and learning of the lunar phases reveals a low level of understanding of this astronomical phenomenon by most students of all educational levels. Therefore, there is a need to develop didactic materials to promote adequate comprehension of this phenomenon and which have been tried out in the classroom. Presented…

Teaching astronomy to young generations is of great importance because astronomy education helps us to better understand the world we are living in and to find answers to our questions. In this regard, the current study aimed to determine the secondary school 4th grade students' mental models of the astronomer. The current research is designed as…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Astronomy Education Research.] This paper presents the cases of two doctoral students in observational astrophysics whose circumstances and experiences led them on a career trajectory out of academic research. In this article, I employ a sociocultural lens that provides insight into the dynamics of…

Makerspaces provide a viable option for constructing and sharing knowledge in schools. Inherent in the designing, tinkering, and playing that learners engage in through making are competencies, such as the ability to create, problem solve, and innovate, decreed as critical by education policymakers. This paper summarizes results from a study in a…

In this paper, we present a case study of a pair of students as they use nondisciplinary communicative practices to mechanistically reason about binary star dynamics. To do so, we first review and bring together the theoretical perspectives of social semiotics and embodied cognition, therein developing a new methodological approach for analyzing…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of using 'hands-on' models (HOMs) to teach the subject of seasons--a topic about which students often have misconceptions--on students' expressed models. To this end, three different HOMs were developed. The study sample consisted of 80 seventh graders (ages 12-13). The study had a…

In light of the challenges facing science educators and special education teachers in Singapore, this study entails design-based research to develop participatory learning environments. Drawing upon Vygotskian perspectives, this case study was situated in an informal workshop around the theme of "day and night" working for Special Needs…

This study proposed an analytic framework for coding students' dialogic argumentation and investigated the characteristics of the small-group argumentation pattern observed in modeling-based learning. The participants were 122 second grade high school students in South Korea divided into an experimental and a comparison group. Modeling-based…

The aim of this study was to reveal whether there were differences in the understanding of scientific models according to their conceptions of lunar phases. The participants were 252 10th grader in South Korea. They were asked to respond SUMS (Students Understanding of Models in Science) instrument and to draw and explain why the different lunar…

Situating science concepts in concrete and authentic contexts, using information and communications technologies, including multimodal modeling tools, is important for promoting the development of higher-order thinking skills in learners. However, teachers often struggle to integrate emergent multimodal models into a technology-rich informal…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the 5E learning model affects learning about the Solar System when an analogical model is utilized in teaching. The data were gathered in an urban middle school 7th grade science course while teaching relevant astronomy topics. The analogical model developed by the researchers was administered to 20…

This paper presents a model of how children generate concrete concepts from perception through processes of differentiation and integration. The model informs the design of a novel methodology ("evolutionary maps" or "emaps"), whose implementation on certain domains unfolds the web of itineraries that children may follow in the…