Analytical questions are the types of questions that can lead students to gain an understanding of a concept and explore reasoning. This research is a descriptive, qualitative study investigating the emergence of analytical questions and their interaction patterns in group discussions facilitated by a scientific approach to learning. The subjects…

Research in Organic Chemistry education has revealed students' challenges in mechanistic reasoning. When solving mechanistic tasks, students tend to focus on explicit surface features, apply fragmented conceptual knowledge, rely on rote-memorization and, hence, often struggle to build well-grounded causal explanations. When taking a resource…

Background: The competencies for the 21st century are defined as a broad and interrelated system of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes enabling the full application of man in personal and professional life. Regarding the science education competencies combining science and scientific knowledge, as well as skills such as inquiry, critical…

One of the central goals of modern science and chemistry education is to develop students' abilities to understand complex phenomena, and productively engage in explanation, justification, and argumentation. To accomplish this goal, we should better characterise the types of reasoning that we expect students to master in the different scientific…

In response to the authors, I demonstrate how threshold concepts offer a means to both contextualise teaching and learning of quantum physics and help transform students into the culture of physics, and as a way to identify particularly troublesome concepts within quantum physics. By drawing parallels from my own doctoral research in another area…

Conflicting explanations and unrelated information in science classrooms increase cognitive load and decrease efficiency in learning. This reduced efficiency ultimately limits one's ability to solve reasoning problems in the science. In reasoning, it is the ability of students to sift through and identify critical pieces of information that is of…

The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain students' achievements in solving context-based gas exercises comprising the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels of chemical concepts. The influence of specific variables, such as interest in learning, formal-reasoning abilities, and visualisation abilities, is a significant factor that should…

A dynamic assessment tool was developed and validated using Mokken scale analysis to assess the extent to which kindergartners are able to construct unconfounded experiments, an essential part of scientific reasoning. Scientific reasoning is one of the learning processes happening within science education. A commonly used, hands-on,…

The use of external representations has the potential to facilitate inquiry learning, especially hypothesis generation and reasoning, which typically present difficulties for students. This study describes a novel three-dimensional cognitive mapping (3DCM) approach that supports inquiry learning by allowing learners to combine the information on a…

The use of science classroom discourse analysis as a way to gain a better understanding of various student cognitive outcomes has a rich history in Science Education in general and Physics Education Research (PER) in particular. When students talk to each other in a collaborative peer instruction environment, such as in the CLASP classes…

The number of day-to-day challenges has increased at every stage of life, particularly in developing countries, and therefore there is a crying need for a search for solutions. Education plays an important role in providing correct direction, and science education can prove crucial in achieving this goal. Solutions to individual as well as…

The relationship between a student's stated preference for solving a problem and his/her actual problem methodology, concrete or abstract, was studied. Comparisons were made between formal and nonformal students. (MP)

A long-standing issue in cognitive psychology is the question of content effects upon problem-solving skills, that is, do students' problem-solving abilities generalize across specific subject matter domains? Although Piaget argued that formal reasoning strategies are independent of content, the well-known decalogs of Piaget can be interpreted as…

Many science curriculum development projects have the goal of increasing students' ability to employ scientific or formal reasoning strategies. Argues that longitudinal data of students who acquired formal reasoning strategies as a consequence of specific instruction are needed to provide evidence that these skills will help in other academic…

Described are how students (n=2,000) reduce the complexity of multivariable problems. Tendencies toward "functional reduction" in common reasoning are shown to range from a simple reduction in the number of variables considered, to a more elaborate procedure where all variables are taken into account, but in a simplified way involving…