The curriculum for undergraduate Agricultural Engineering does not usually include much laboratory practice. In order to address this, here we propose the design of a practical class on legume-rhizobia symbiosis, using an interdisciplinary approach that takes elements from botany, agriculture, and microbiology. The students perform an assay to…

This study investigated the effects of providing domain information in an early stage of an inquiry process, together with an aligned hypothesis scratchpad, on inquiry learning, and hypothesis generation in particular. Participants were provided with basic domain information that was adapted to their prior knowledge (experimental condition) or…

Building on rich training literature, we examined which skills constituting the control-of-variables strategy (CVS) benefit from a comprehensive training, and which develop similarly during content-focused inquiry at ages 10-12. In addition, we examined whether prior knowledge, reasoning abilities, and reading comprehension explain variation in…

Cognitive activation is one of the central quality characteristics of teaching. Studies which analyzed cognitive activation in science instruction and its influence on the achievement and the interest of students, took most of the times place in higher grades. Since scientific thinking can be taught at a very early stage and, in particular,…

Despite its recognized importance for cultural transmission, little is known about the role imitation plays in language learning. Three experiments examine how rates of imitation vary as a function of qualitative differences in the way language is used in a small indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico and three Western comparison groups. Data from…

Science lecturers usually do not pay special attention to giving students the chance to evaluate persistent unexpected experimental findings that they cannot explain with their existing theories, propose alternative hypotheses and develop new theories in inquiry tasks at schools, despite the importance of these processes in scientific discoveries.…

The transition from high school to tertiary education can be a daunting prospect for students. The prospect of laboratories, an unfamiliar environment, for students, can increase levels of anxiety. Moreover, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that students' self-efficacy is inversely correlated with students' anxiety. We surveyed…

Standard decision theory assumes that choices result from stable preferences. This position has been challenged by claims that the act of choosing between goods may alter preferences. To test this claim, we investigated in three experiments whether choices between equally valued snack food items can systematically shape preferences. We directly…

This article investigates how interactive representations can be used to enhance conceptual learning. It is a naturalistic study of 14 students in four groups aged 16--17 years working with an interactive simulator. The article is based on qualitative data to enable analyses of the students' processes of conceptual learning as interactive…

This study examines the effectiveness of classroom experiments conducted before the relevant theories were taught. The experiments were used to provide students with first-hand experience of decision-making under various rivalry settings and to demonstrate several key predictions of oligopoly models. Statistical methods were used to analyze the…

Learning often involves integration of information from multiple texts. The aim of the current study was to determine whether relevant information from previously read texts is spontaneously activated during reading, allowing for integration between texts (experiment 1 and 2), and whether this process is related to the representation of the texts…

Students in secondary schools in Tanzania have been facing difficulties in conducting laboratory experiments. This has been due to the acute shortage of laboratory facilities and poor teaching methodologies. Consequently, students perceive science subjects as unattractive, difficult and irrelevant to understanding the world around them. An…

This paper explores the ways students perceive the transfer of learned knowledge to new situations -- often a surprisingly difficult prospect. The novel aspect compared to the traditional transfer studies is that the learning phase is not a part of the experiment itself. The intention was only to activate acquired knowledge relevant to the…

This paper describes investigative homework with apples, aiming to contribute to the primary-school students' understanding of density and conditions leading to floating and sinking. The assignment represents an opportunity for individual autonomous learning of physics and adoption of established scientific concepts through practical activities…

Based on cognitive load theory, the effect of different levels of instructional detail and expertise in a simulation-based environment on learning about concepts of correlation was investigated. Separate versions of the learning environment were designed for the four experimental conditions which differed only with regard to the levels of written…