Thinking about knowledge and knowing ("i.e.", epistemic cognition) is an important part of student learning and has implications for how they apply their knowledge in future courses, careers, and other aspects of their lives. Three classes of models have emerged from research on epistemic cognition: developmental models, dimensional…

Machine learning (ML) has become commonplace in educational research and science education research, especially to support assessment efforts. Such applications of machine learning have shown their promise in replicating and scaling human-driven codes of students' work. Despite this promise, we and other scholars argue that machine learning has…

Advancing equity and justice in undergraduate biology education requires research to address the experiences of disabled students. Scholars working in disability studies have developed models of disability that inform Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER). To date, DBER literature has been predominantly informed by the medical and social…

The communities of practice (COP) framework describes learning as a process of navigating one's position of membership within a community of professionals pursuing a set of common goals using established practices. As students navigate their membership within a community like a physics research group, they develop a mental model of the community…

The exponential growth of scientific publications increases the effort required to identify relevant articles. Moreover, the scale of studies is a frequent barrier to research as the majority of studies are low or medium-scaled and do not generalize well while lacking statistical power. As such, we introduce an automated method that supports the…

The models and modelling takes an important place in the teaching of science. The purpose of this research was to examine the postgraduate theses made in Turkey about models and modelling in the science education field by using the content analysis method. When the postgraduate theses were examined in respect to the purpose of the research, it has…

Our technological, information-rich society thrives because of scientific thinking. However, a comprehensive theory of the development of scientific thinking remains elusive. Building on previous theoretical and empirical work in conceptual change, the role of credibility and plausibility in evaluating scientific evidence and claims, science…

The Repertory Grid Technique (RGT) is a qualitative method, based on the Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) theory, which provides a powerful tool to elicit tacit personal construction systems, with minimal intervention and interpretation. Although the contributory potential of the RGT as a cognitive research tool in science education has been…

Science education focuses on the methods of thinking about and using process skills rather than memorizing scientific facts. 5E educational model aims to learn by discovering scientific knowledge and engaging students in learning environments. The aim of this study was to examine the articles in the field of education related to the 5E educational…

We have used an unsupervised machine learning method called latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to thematically analyze all papers published in the Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings between 2001 and 2018. By looking at co-occurrences of words across the data corpus, this technique has allowed us to identify ten distinct themes or…

Idealizations are omnipresent in science. However, to date, science education research has paid surprisingly little attention to the use of idealizations in fostering students' model competence and understanding of the nature of science (NOS). The starting point for the theoretical reflection in this paper is that insufficient consideration of…

Studying the factors that influence the quality of physics Ph.D. students'doctoral experiences, especially those that motivate them to stay or leave their programs, is critical for providing them with more holistic and equitable support. Prior literature on doctoral attrition has found that students with clear research interests who establish an…

This essay centers on the voices of leading scholars in science and STEM education on how equity can and should be centered in reviewing proposals for granting organizations. As the decisions made as a result of the reviewing process significantly impact the future directions of the field, we recognize the urgency in considering how equity is…

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) refers to the content-specific knowledge that teachers use to promote students' learning of specific subject matter. PCK comprises multiple knowledge components that interact with each other when enacted in teachers' instructional practices. For many years, researchers lacked a robust methodological approach to…

As an alternative to the traditional metallocene laboratory targets, students synthesize Cp[subscript 2]TiCl[subscript 2], bis([eta][superscript 5]-cyclopentadienyl)dichloridotitanium(IV), from the mildly moisture-sensitive cis-TiCl[subscript 4](thf)[subscript 2]. Air-free handling techniques are emphasized, but the (mostly) air-stable,…