Threshold concepts are essential ideas about the natural world that present either a barrier or a gateway to a deep understanding of science. Weight, mass, and gravity are threshold concepts that underpin students' abilities to understand important ideas in all fields of science, embodied in the performance expectations in the Next Generation…

There have been a limited number of studies on the short-term influence of environmental and earth education programs, however, not much information is available about the long-term influence of these programs on participants' environmental attitudes and actions. This mixed methods study explores the long-term influence of the earth education…

Providing learners with control over their learning does not always result in improved learning. For instance, research on tool-use in computer-based learning environments has demonstrated that tool-use behavior of learners is often suboptimal and does not fully support learning. Advice, or guided instruction, has been recognized as an…

A study examined how many of 11 key words in 4 famous Mother Goose nursery rhymes were understood by parents of first graders. The first questionnaire (designed to determine if context clues were helpful in deciphering what words meant) was returned by 37 parents in an urban school district and by 49 parents in a suburban school district. The…