Global climate change (GCC) is one of the greatest challenges of our age and a highly significant socio-scientific issue (SSI). Developing secondary students' understanding about the Earth's climate and GCC is critical for empowering future citizens and a key focus of the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States, 2013). In…

The present study has two main goals. First, it aims to examine the analogies an instructor uses about "DNA conservation across generations" in a university-level General Biology course. Second, it aims to examine the analogies used in those lessons according to Thiele and Treagust's framework. A qualitative case study design is adopted…

Data comparison problems are used in teaching and science education research that focuses on students' ability to compare datasets and their conceptual understanding of measurement uncertainties. However, the evaluation of students' decisions in these problems can pose a problem: e.g., students making a correct decision for the wrong reasons.…

There is an emphasis on survival-based selection in biology education that can allow students to neglect other important evolutionary components, such as sexual selection, reproduction, and inheritance. Student understanding of the role of reproduction in evolution is as important as student understanding of the role of survival. Limiting…

The purpose of this article is to present an analysis to identify the reasoning processes and representations that preschool students develop about sound based on the inferential-representational approach. Participants were 18 preschool students between the ages of four and five attending three rural schools located in the Sierra Norte of Puebla,…

Identifying students' difficulties in understanding Gauss's and Ampere's laws is important for developing educational strategies that promote an expertlike understanding of the field concept and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetic phenomena. This study aims to analyze and compare students' understanding of symmetry when applying Gauss's and…

In this paper, we seek to evaluate the extent to which students can follow a deductive reasoning chain when it is presented to them. A great deal of instruction in introductory physics courses is centered on presenting students with a logical argument that starts from first principles and systematically leads to a particular conclusion. This…

Through analysis of a classroom lesson led by a decorated teacher, we illustrate how instructional practices favor students seeking empirical patterns at the expense of using mechanistic reasoning. In the lesson, when students spontaneously come up with hypothetical mechanisms to explain why a light bulb in an electric circuit does or does not…

Scientific reasoning ability is essential to get developed in the current digital age, particularly in the process of judgement and decision-making in complex problems. Few studies have conducted an in-depth exploration of scientific reasoning ability, especially in relation to the confidence level and gender. The scientific reasoning ability of…

This contribution belongs to a larger empirical study that focuses on issues related to the implementation of inquiry-based learning and formative assessment in science and mathematics education, while it also refers to the issue of STEM education. Here, we discuss the two topics from the perspective of professional preparation of primary school…

This study aims to reveal the trends and foundations in research on students' conceptual understanding in science education. The literature was selected from three recognized journals in science education. The Structural Topic Model (STM) method was used to categorize articles into ten topics considering information about the semantic cohesion and…

Children's developing reasoning skills are better understood within the context of their social and cultural lives. As part of a research-museum partnership, this article reports a study exploring science-relevant conversations of 82 families, with children between 3 and 11 years, while visiting a children's museum exhibit about mammoth bones, and…

This study investigated how studying a refutational map, a type of argument map, affected conceptual change. Refutational maps visually display both correct and alternative conceptions. Participants (N = 120) were randomly assigned to (1) a refutational map condition, (2) a refutational text condition, and (3) a non-refutational text condition.…

During the last four decades, the results of a great deal of research have indicated that, prior to any formal instruction in physics, students hold scientifically incorrect ideas about physics concepts in general, and about the force and motion concepts in particular, the latter being considered central in science teaching. To these days,…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the argumentative structure of students' arguments using argumentation schemes as an instrument for reconstructing the missing premises underlying their reasoning. Building on the recent literature in science education, in order for an explanation to be persuasive and achieve a conceptual change it needs…