Currently critical thinking skills is becoming an important education issue to overcome the challanges of industrial revolution 4.0. Previous studies reported that the pre-service teachers' critical thinking dispositions and skills were still low, therefore, both aspects of critical thinking should be improved through learning activities in higher…

The NASA public archives present a vast resource of authentic satellite data that research astronomers have tapped into for decades. Recently, the same data analysis tools used by professional astronomers have been adapted into a browser-based interface called JS9 for easy use by any interested student. Tutorials and classroom-ready activities…

Effectively mastering organic chemistry means having the ability to recognize structural patterns, identify properties or behaviors as a result of patterns, manipulate and transform representations, and predict future outcomes. Often students rely on rote memorization of seemingly disconnected information instead of developing a sound…

Content-language integration has been perceived to be an effective approach in second and foreign language learning. However, it can be challenging to implement in content classes, especially in science classrooms. Researchers have suggested using tasks and games to help design diverse opportunities for language and content learning; in…

During a short chemometrics course in the seventh semester of the chemistry undergraduate program, students receive a brief theoretical introduction to multivariate calibration, focused on partial least-squares regression as the most commonly employed data processing tool. The theory is complemented with the use of MVC1_R, an easy-to-use software…

Successful learning of biochemistry requires students to engage with the material. In the past this often involved students writing out pathways by hand, and more recently directing students to online resources such as videos, songs, and animated slide presentations. However, even these latter resources do not really provide students an…

Automatic assessment and evaluation of team performance during collaborative tasks is key to the research on learning analytics and computer-supported cooperative work. There is growing interest in the use of gaze-oriented cues for evaluating the collaboration and cooperativeness of teams. However, collecting gaze data using eye-trackers is not…

Reading has been regarded as a medium for learning science, revealing the importance of enhancing learners' reading competence in science education. The critical features of science texts are their multiple representations, such as text and visual elements, which assist the representation of science concepts. A multimedia learning environment can…

This dissertation conducted a science classroom intervention using two instructional approaches, computational modeling and paper-based pictorial modeling, in the context of food webs. A series of research papers were written on the impact of the intervention on students' attitudes and learning, and on teachers via professional development and…

Literature in "Physics Education" has shown that students encounter many difficulties in understanding wave propagation. Such difficulties lead to misconceptions also in understanding sound, often used as context to teach wave propagation. To address these issues, we present in this paper a module in which the students are engaged in…

SCILAB is a lesser-known program (than MATLAB) for numeric simulations and has the advantage of being free software. A challenging software-based activity to analyze the most common linear reversible inhibition types with SCILAB is described. Students establish typical values for the concentration of enzyme, substrate, and inhibitor to simulate…

In a plural, complex, and diverse society, the school faces many challenges. Teachers must prepare their students for future professions, unthinkable nowadays, and the digital competences of teachers and students are one of the axes of an advanced school. This book presents a set of works rigorously elaborated by authors of different disciplines,…

Structured argumentation support environments have been built and used in scientific discourse in the literature. However, to the best our knowledge, there is no research work in the literature examining whether student's knowledge has grown during learning activities with asynchronous argumentation. In this work, an intelligent computer-supported…

Optional (non-assessed) learning activities are a learning tool that may help students achieve their desired grade, or help students with lower levels of previous experience in the topic. This study examines the implementation of, and outcomes from, two optional activities, one online and one paper-based. The activities complemented the lectures…

The present study examines the effects of different study tasks on the acquisition of knowledge about acids and bases in a computer-based learning environment. Three different task formats were selected to create three treatment conditions: learning with gap-fill and matching tasks, learning with multiple-choice tasks, and learning only from text…