Critical Thinking & Problem Solving belong to 21st century skills that enhance ways of thinking, learning, working and living in the world. When combined with well-designed educational activities, mobile technology has the capacity to foster these abilities. This study evaluates the Critical Thinking & Problem Solving skills of ninth-grade…

Satellite laboratories, designed to ignite interest in technical and computer science topics, employ cross-age peer tutoring and physical computing platforms. Catering to students from 5th grade onwards, these laboratories are led by tutors from 9th grade onwards. Employing a design-based research approach, the project aims to comprehensively…

The plight of refugees has recently received considerable media coverage. Yet, little attention is given to groups who are internally displaced. The purpose of this article is to model one way to teach about internally displaced peoples, drawing on the Rohingya crisis as a specific example. We first provide a background of the Rohingya crisis, and…

Middle school students often struggle when writing testable problems, planning valid and reliable procedures, and drawing meaningful evidence-based conclusions. To address this issue, the author created a student-centered lab handout to facilitate the inquiry process for students. This handout has reduced students' frustration and helped them…

When life hands you lemons, make a battery! In this article, the authors describe an activity they refer to as "Juan's Dilemma," an extension of the familiar lemon-battery activity (Goodisman 2001). Juan's Dilemma integrates oxidation and reduction chemistry with circuit theory in a fun, real-world exercise. The authors designed this activity for…

This article investigates the mechanisms that govern the processes of inclusion and exclusion of knowledge. It draws on three cases from Swedish classrooms about how energy is created as an area of knowledge. We are interested in how knowledge is made valid and legitimate in a school context, and in defining and finding tools to identify…

Too often, students enter our classrooms with insufficient knowledge of physical science. As a result, they have a difficult time understanding content in texts, lectures, and laboratory activities. This lack of background knowledge can have an impact on their ability to ask questions and wonder--both key components of inquiry. In this article,…

Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) has been shown to enhance rote memory skills and improve higher order critical thinking skills. The challenge now is to identify what aspects of CAI improve which specific higher-order skills. This study focuses on the effectiveness of using CAI to teach logarithmic graphing and dimensional analysis. Two groups…