Purpose: This study explored the relationship of robotics activity with the development of conceptual understanding skills among secondary school students. Method: Forty-four sixteen-year-old Form 4 (Year 10) students in a fully government-aided school who have access to functioning LEGO-Mindstorms sets during physics lessons participated in the…

Interdisciplinary curriculum supports cognitive development through well planned lessons at early age. This article focuses on a specific experimental study done in 2010 on Grade 7 learners in a Lebanese private school to aid them in empowering their skills and competencies to solve a real life problem. The objective of this experimental study is…

University and high school students not pursuing a science, technology, engineering, and/or mathematics (STEM) course of study demonstrate less developed scientific reasoning than their STEM-based peers. Previous studies show that the majority of non-STEM students can be classified as either concrete operational or transitional reasoners in…

The Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (LCTSR) was used to gauge the relative effectiveness of three different methods of pedagogy, "Reading, Presenting, and Questioning" (RPQ), "Experimenting and Discussion" (ED), and "Traditional Methods" (TM), on increasing students' level of scientific thinking. The…

Answers to questions in a grade 11 physics examination were analyzed to provide information on the cognitive development of Australian science students. Data from questions concerned with volume, mass and weight, levers and proportion, speed and velocity, acceleration and relative speed are compared with Piaget's findings: many of the students do…

Presents the procedures, results, and conclusions of a study designed to compare the cognitive performance of students from a new curricula (PSSC) and from traditional (non-PSSC) curricula. Results essentially supported contention that PSSC materials were more effective in developing higher cognitive skills. (DS)

Students' preferences changed from applied to theoretical aspects of physics, and from recall of facts to identification of fundamental principles during two years of study of the Physical Science Study Committee in Australian High Schools. (AL)

Presents a physics instruction technique which utilizes study modules to aid students to think better and not to depend upon memorized facts. (SL)

This study investigated the extent to which certain aspects of the structure of a learner's memory following instruction corresponded with the structure of the instructional material. Content structure was represented using digraph theory. The digraph analysis revealed a formal structure built substantially on six specific concepts. Cognitive…

The findings of Piaget suggest that learning physics can help people achieve a series of four distinct but overlapping stages of intellectual growth as they search for patterns and relationships. (MLH)

Misconceptions associated with the origins of force and the effectiveness of a bridging strategy for developing correct conceptual models in mechanics are identified for high school physics teachers in this paper. The situation investigated was whether a table exerts an upward force on a book. Student misconceptions related to this phenomenon as…

This paper reports on research carried out in Sweden on concept formation as related to science education. Particular emphasis is given to the aquisition of the concepts of proportionality and density by tenth-grade students. Comparisons were made of the student's everyday thoughts about density and their ability to understand the Cartesian Diver…

This investigation looks at the difficulties tenth-grade students have with the concept of proportionality and the problems this causes in tenth-grade physics. Students were asked to solve various problems in the areas of volume measurement and weight, all relating to proportionality, and their approaches to the tasks were recorded. As a result,…