Despite advances to move anatomy education away from its didactic history, there is a continued need for students to contextualize their studies to make learning more meaningful. This article investigates authentic learning in the context of an inquiry-based approach to learning human gross anatomy. Utilizing a case-study design with three groups…

Classical mechanics challenges students to use their intuitions and experiences as a basis for understanding, in effect to approach learning as "a refinement of everyday thinking'' (Einstein, 1936). Moving on to quantum mechanics (QM), students, like physicists, need to adjust this approach, in particular with respect to the roles that…

Recently, theorists have raised concerns that pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has become "a stale metaphor" that disregards diversity and equity, offers little to help teachers address students' misconceptions, and portrays knowledge as "in the head" versus in practice. We refute these notions using grounded theory to…

Children often learn information in a context that is vastly different to the one in which they are asked to recall or use that information. Despite this, little is known about the effect of context change on children's recall of educational information. Here, 197 5- and 6-year-olds were taught the same interactive lesson in their classroom or on…

Much of the literature on science teaching suggests that elementary teachers lack relevant prior experiences with science. This study begins to reframe the deficit approach to research in science teaching by privileging the experiences elementary teachers have had with science--both in and out of schools--throughout their lives. Our work uses…

Misconceptions are the "the old, the bad, and the ugly" prior knowledge, ideas or conceptions that the learners have that hinder their further learning in science. Several types of misconceptions that undergraduate students hold about reaction coordinate diagrams (from here on we use the term "reaction coordinate diagrams" and…

Research on the design of learning environments for K-12 science education has been informed by two bodies of literature: inquiry-based science and Constructionism. Inquiry-based science has emphasized engagement in activities that reflect authentic scientific practices. Constructionism has focused on designing intuitively accessible authoring…

The study is part of a larger project concerned with addressing the problem that Eritrean science teachers face in their attempt to implement a new learner-centred science curriculum. Specifically, the study attempted to determine the effects of the use of an Argumentation-Based Instructional Model (ABIM) on 25 pre-service science teachers'…

As we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century, one may predict that the environment will be among the dominant themes in the political and educational discourse. Over the past three decades, particular perspectives regarding the environment have begun to emerge: (i) realization by human beings that we not only live on earth and use…

This study presents an 'education for sustainability' curricular model which promotes science learning in an elementary classroom through equity pedagogy. A total of 25 fourth-grade students from an urban, public school in Denver, Colorado participated in this mixed-methods study where concept maps were used as a tool for describing and assessing…

Undergraduate biology education reform aims to engage students in scientific practices such as experimental design, experimentation, and data analysis and communication. Graphs are ubiquitous in the biological sciences, and creating effective graphical representations involves quantitative and disciplinary concepts and skills. Past studies…

We present a newly validated and refined framework, TA-PIVOT (TA Practices In and Views Of Teaching), for examining how physics TAs talk about and how they engage in physics teaching. This work builds upon and extends prior efforts to characterize instructors' beliefs and practices by examining both domains in parallel. We present the…

This research documents the aims and the impact of a teaching experiment on how the absorption of light depends on the thickness of the absorbing medium. This teaching experiment is more specifically characterized as bringing to bear a "concept-driven interactive pathway". It is designed to make students analyse the absorption of light…

Purpose: The rationale behind this study was to investigate how three Grade 5 Natural Sciences teachers in three Western Cape primary schools teach science concepts so as to enable the researcher to gain a deeper understanding and more insightful perception of the ways in which the pedagogical practices of South African primary school teachers…

The concept of energy serves biologists as a powerful analytical model to describe phenomena that occurs in the natural world. Due to the concept's relevance, educational standards of different countries identify energy as a core idea for the teaching and learning of biology and other science subjects. However, previous research on students'…