Teaching with analogies is an important pedagogy that helps learners construct abstract conceptions through reasoning with something familiar. Heat concepts were chosen for this study because they have an intangible nature and involve complex mechanisms that often challenge school-aged learners. Learning this kind of complex concept with analogies…

Visualisation has been a critical means of scientific reasoning, knowledge development, and communication. In science classrooms, visualisation plays significant roles for teaching and learning. To better understand the landscape of the existing research on visualisation for supporting student science learning in K to 12 classroom contexts, we…

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…

This paper describes the design of an instrument to assess secondary school students' proficiency in structure-property reasoning (SPR). Design criteria for the instrument required that it should be based on a comprehensive model for structure-property reasoning, assess both reproductive and productive use of structure-property reasoning, be…

Abilities in scientific thinking and reasoning have been emphasized as core areas of initiatives, such as the Next Generation Science Standards or the College Board Standards for College Success in Science, which focus on the skills the future will demand of today's students. Although there is rich literature on studies of how these abilities…

The use of scientific modeling has been shown to be highly effective in the learning of science content in multiple disciplines for non-English Learners (EL). However, the benefits of using this pedagogy with ELs have not been heavily explored. This article discusses the use of modeling-based evolution and population ecology pedagogical units in a…

Analogies have many advantages for students such as concretizing abstract concepts and enabling motivation. Analogies are frequently used in textbooks. Research shows that the analogies in textbooks are not used based on certain directives and sometimes lead to misconceptions for students. Therefore, analysing the analogies in textbooks on several…

This study compared student scientific reasoning and conceptual knowledge in argumentation-based and traditional instruction, taught in school regions with low and high socio-economic status (SES) respectively. Furthermore, concrete and formal reasoning students' scientific reasoning and conceptual knowledge were compared during both instructions…

We applied a mixed-method research design to investigate the patterns of reasoning used by novice undergraduate chemistry students to classify chemical substances as elements, compounds, or mixtures based on their particulate representations. We were interested in the identification of the representational features that students use to build a…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether providing students with continuous written instructional support or fading written instructional support (scaffolds) better prepares students to construct scientific explanations when they are no longer provided with support. This article investigated the influence of scaffolding on 331…