One of the critical goals of teaching chemistry is to enable learners to gain conceptual understanding. Traditional instruction has often been associated with rote memorisation, resulting in learners failing to explain observed chemical phenomena, make predictions based on acquired concepts, advance convincing arguments, and engage in meaningful…

Big ideas in science education are meant to be interpretive frameworks that empower student learning. Unfortunately, outside of the broad conception of scientific evaluation, there are few theoretical explanations of how this might happen. Therefore, we contribute one such explanation, an instructional concept called integrative analysis wherein…

An important educational goal is enabling students to learn scientific concepts. The scientific concepts learned in class are developed within students' cognitive structures. Despite the successful application of Semantic Network Analysis (SNA) to study these cognitive structures, there has been limited examination of students' concept networks…

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…

This article describes the design and evaluation of a simulation environment for special relativity (SR) education at the secondary level. In recent years, SR has become increasingly popular in secondary school curricula worldwide. Because the key concepts in SR are very remote from everyday experience, they are difficult for students to learn.…

Old physics textbooks give us a great opportunity to learn about the history of science and rediscover different methods to teach physics to our students. There are many disused and forgotten experiments in them, but these can still be very useful to affirm and understand physics. This is the case of an instrument used in the 19th century to…

The greenhouse effect is a complex scientific phenomenon that plays a crucial role in understanding climate change. Grasping students' understanding of this phenomenon on the content-specific level but also how students' conceptions are organized is vital for effective climate change education. This study addresses both levels and delves into the…

The purpose of this study is to examine how students may hold coexisting and competing conceptual ideas and how students' uses of such ideas may evolve during the process of conceptual change by combining two complementary methods including model analysis and the conceptual framework model of knowledge integration. Conceptual change is fundamental…

Educational initiatives in multiple disciplinary areas call for student engagement in the practice of argumentation (CCSSI, 2010a, 2010b; Mullis & Martin, 2017; NGSS Lead States, 2013; OECD, 2018). In science education, immersive argument-based inquiry (ABI) is one category of approaches which integrates argumentation in all classroom activity…

This study focuses on examining the mental models of 11th and 12th-grade students attending a science high school in Turkey regarding the concept of the electron cloud. The study involved 72 students and employed the case study method. The precondition for selecting the sample was that the students had covered the unit on modern atomic theory in…

Although Machine Learning (ML) is found practically everywhere, few understand the technology behind it. This presents new challenges to extend computing education by including ML concepts in order to help students to understand its potential and limits and empowering them to become creators of intelligent solutions. Therefore, we developed an…

In this paper, we described the development of the High School Wave Optics Test (HSWOT). Firstly, 56 conceptual, multiple-choice items with a single correct answer and three distractors were created. Next, we conducted an initial review of the items which resulted in reducing the item pool to 44 highest quality items. Validity evidence and…

Secondary science education plays a key role in students' process to become scientifically literate citizens. However, teaching students to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to deal with complex societal issues is challenging. This paper reports about a study in which Scrum -- a methodology to manage complex projects -- was implemented in…

Teachers face challenges when building the concept of substance with students because tensions of meanings emerge from students' daily life and canonical ideas developed in classrooms. A powerful tool to address learning, pedagogical, and research challenges is the conceptual profile theory. According to this theory, people employ various ways of…

To enhance teaching and learning about Earth's climate and global climate change (GCC) in secondary science classrooms, the authors are engaged in a four-year, National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project to develop, implement, and evaluate a new four-week curriculum module grounded in the use of a data-driven, computer-based climate modeling…