Meyer and Land's work (among subsequent others) on threshold concepts (TCs) has been influential in numerous subjects, particularly in higher education. However, despite its growing international interest, its application into the domain of music in schools is a highly under-researched area. This article draws on the notion of TCs focusing on the…

Stimulating interest in science at an early age is important for STEM education. This work details an educational activity utilizing the anthocyanins found in butterfly pea flowers ("Clitoria ternatea"). This activity was developed for use in official classroom settings, online, and/or at-home with parental or educator guidance. Primary…

Learning about redox and electrochemistry in senior secondary school science has long been recognised as both impenetrable to many students and problematic for teachers. A significant barrier to understanding this area of learning has been the apparent exclusive use of implicit analogous definitions for the foundation concept of an oxidation…

Motivational hands-on workshops for grade-school level future scientists are needed to inspire young and receptive minds. Described here is an educational event, titled "Inspiring Future Rocket Chemists", with hands-on laboratory exercises demonstrating the fundamentals of rocket flight and live chemistry demonstrations illustrating the…

In Realistic Mathematics Education (RME), students should reach formal mathematics knowledge and explore mathematics based on their informal knowledge. The problems chosen in the exploration process should apply mathematics to real-life situations and be suitable for students to explore and create mathematical structures. In the current study, the…

This study provides a partial-credit scoring (PCS) approach to awarding students' performance on multiple-choice items in science education. The approach is built on "fundamental ideas," the critical pieces of students' understanding and knowledge to solve science problems. We link each option of the items to several specific fundamental…

Students beginning college chemistry are expected to arrive prepared with fundamental, prerequisite conceptual understanding and skills from high school. While some topics may be reviewed explicitly in the course, prerequisite material-including hidden prerequisites often overlooked by faculty-is typically considered assumed prior knowledge and…

A pilot programme 'Successful Transitions' was conducted by the 'Shannon Consortium' and funded by the Higher Education Authority Strategic Innovation Fund from 2014 to 2016. Second level students who were currently engaged in challenging academic work involving key threshold concepts were selected for instruction designed to improve…

Citizenship educators have not yet developed a satisfactory framework for describing the conceptual knowledge at the heart of their subject and the complex ways in which students develop understanding. By focusing on how young people (10-18 years of age) use the core citizenship concepts of power and agency, this research provides an insight into…

This article provides and reflects on an original lesson plan for engaging high school, undergraduate, or graduate students in learning fundamental concepts of environmental ethics. Implementation of this lesson plan effectively promoted critical analysis, reflection, and communication of environmental ethics issues in a seminar for second-year…

This paper presents the assessment items that were developed by science and technology teachers in Québec to explore their students' alternative ideas about engineering design technology and technological systems. These assessment items were administered to Secondary Cycle One students in Francophone and Anglophone schools in Québec to elicit…

Contribution: A do-it-yourself (DIY) light wave sensing (LWS) and communication project was developed to generate interest and clarify basic electromagnetic (EM) and wireless sensing/communication concepts among students at different education levels from middle school to undergraduate. This article demonstrates the nature of the project and its…

In this paper we describe the development of an online tool for assessing the foundational knowledge and competencies essential to understanding money and building financial literacy. We present findings from an initial study using the tool to (i) measure basic skills with money among secondary students with intellectual disability (N = 85) and…

It has recently been suggested that pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has a concept-specific nature, beyond the topic-specific level of PCK. This paper reports a case study of three pre-service teachers' reported PCK about three fundamental concepts within the topic of electrostatics, namely electrostatic force, electric field and electric field…

In an ideal instructional context, one would expect the components (teacher, content and instructional strategy) to operate in harmony, in tandem and in a complementary manner. When these components are not in harmony, they are said to be in a state of 'instructional contextual contestation'. The components compete rather than complement each…