This study investigates the role of learning dimensions in planning and trialing teaching-learning sequences (TLSs) on surface phenomena in liquids for high school students. Particularly, it aims to identify how different modeling approaches--macroscopic and mesoscopic--impact students' learning in terms of different dimensions of learning such as…

Talking science is based on the premise of being serious and dignified. Still, both teachers and students use humour when they communicate. However, little is known about the mechanisms of how learning science is constituted when teachers and students are using spontaneous humour in science classroom activities. In this study, we acknowledge this…

Over four decades of conceptual change studies in education have been based on the assumption that learners come to science classrooms with functionally fixated intuitive ideas. However, it is largely ignored that such pre-instructional conceptions are probabilistic, reflecting some aspects of an idiosyncratic sampling of their experiences and…

Undergraduate science students face difficulties using mathematics in their physics courses. Choosing an institutional perspective, we consider that these students experience a permanent transition between mathematics in their mathematics courses and mathematics in their physics courses. We refer to the anthropological theory of the didactic and…

Physical education in colleges plays an increasingly important role in cultivating high-quality innovative talent. The main factors that affect college students' approaches to learning physics remain unknown. This study examined the relationships among college engineering students' epistemic views of physics, conceptions of learning physics, and…

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) offers a modern setting for learners to engage in meaningful (meta)cognitive and socioemotional interactions. However, the task design, not technology alone, significantly shapes students' learning interactions. This study investigates how a conceptual physics task and a hands-on robotics task…

Measurement uncertainty is an important topic in the undergraduate laboratory curriculum. Previous research on student thinking about experimental measurement uncertainty has focused primarily on introductory-level students' procedural reasoning about data collection and interpretation. In this paper, we extended this prior work to study…

This study explores the roles of students' help-seeking profiles when seeking help from AI chatbots, specifically ChatGPT, in a digital game-based learning environment, "Summon of Magicrystal." The study involved 102 middle school students who played an online game with the provision of ChatGPT and sought help from ChatGPT while solving…

Research carried out through the last 20 years gave us undeniable evidence that to learn anything we need to be active participants, not passive observers. One of the important aspects of learning physics is constructing explanations of physical phenomena. To support and guide students toward constructing their explanations, teachers need to be…

Preservice elementary teachers enter their science methods courses with a range of prior experience with science practice. Those prior experiences likely inform much of their science pedagogy and goals. In this study, the authors examine how a cohort of preservice elementary teachers engaged in science practice as they learned content in a physics…

The creation and use of models in science is of great importance for knowledge production and communication. For example, toy models are often used as idealized explanatory models in physics education. Models can be a powerful tool for exploring phenomena in ways that facilitate learning. However, careful consideration of instruction and…

Inquiring about students' learning and their difficulties understanding the concepts and models of physics is a familiar challenge in physics education research. Researchers have developed various methodologies, such as phenomenography, to address it. Phenomenography is an empirical approach to determining how people experience and understand…

When learning about the particulate nature of matter (PNM), students tend to attribute the same properties to both particles and to the substances they compose. It has been argued that this might be explained by them categorizing the wrong ontological category. To explain the relationships between submicroscopic and macroscopic levels of matter,…

Research fields related to learning (e.g., educational technology and learning sciences) have historically focused on what questions using traditional methods (e.g., comparing different learning tools and methods). New methodologies that are grounded in learning, engagement, and motivational theories are needed to additionally address the how…

Developing a deeper understanding of scientific concepts is one of the primary goals of science education. To improve students' conceptual understanding, it is necessary to explore the major characteristics of their learning process. Informed by previous work on conceptual understanding, this study focuses on the concept of evaporation, exploring…