Introductory science courses can be a struggle for instructors and students not only because of the challenging nature of the material, but also due to differences in the background knowledge of students. Provision of pre-lecture resources reviewing or introducing key concepts is recommended to support diverse students. In this paper, we describe…

While existing studies have underscored the educational benefits of generating explanatory hypotheses (EHs) in response to unexpected outcomes, empirical research on the underlying mechanisms driving their effectiveness in science learning remains limited. Thus, this study aimed to empirically examine the effectiveness of generating an EH for…

Gender and prior knowledge may affect students' performance and motivation when simulations and games are used for learning. Accommodations should be made for students of different genders and with different levels of prior knowledge. A simulation digital game about the food chain concept geared for elementary school students was developed for…

Abstract concepts dominate university science teaching, and much of this content is taught without sufficient connection to students' prior knowledge or everyday experiences. As this can be problematic for students, the aim of this research was to determine the utility and effectiveness of a professional development module on using analogies to…

Educational video games can engage students in authentic STEM practices, which often involve visual representations. Specifically, because most interactions within video games are mediated through visual representations, video games provide opportunities for students to experience disciplinary practices with visuals. However, prior research has…

Retrieval practice typically benefits later memory more than restudy (i.e., the testing effect). The benefits of retrieval-based learning generalize across a range of materials and contexts, leading many cognitive scientists to advocate for broad educational implementation. However, educators and practitioners call for more research on factors…

In this article, we propose a new model of student workload. We conducted an extensive literature review of student workload, its impact on students' lives, factors influencing student workload, objective and subjective measurements. The previous conceptualizations of student workload conflate student work and course workload, two related but…

Physical phenomena and relations can be described mathematically by functional dependencies. These are represented in the form of tables, graphs, algebraic expressions or verbal descriptions. Only the combination of different representations enables students to experience a physical phenomenon or concept in a holistic way. Therefore, students have…

This study aims to examine the thoughts of fourth-year pre-service science teachers about the nature of science. For this purpose, the study preferred the qualitative research method and phenomenology design. Participants consisted of nine pre-service science teachers. Participants wrote a self-evaluation report after the nature of the science…

A scaffolding-based mind tool was designed to allow teachers to easily create lesson plans for in-class gamified activities and to embed various scaffoldings in the lesson plan design. The purpose of this study was to investigate the learning outcomes of a scaffolding-based mind tool integrated with gamified learning activities applied to a…

In laboratory study environments, dialogue-videos, or videos of a tutor and a tutee solving problems together, have been shown to more effectively improve student learning than monologue-videos, or videos of tutors solving problems alone. Yet, few studies have replicated these findings in the context of authentic university classrooms. Here, we…

A pedagogical technique, named the Bridge activity, has been developed to assist students' transition from preclass preparation to in-class learning within a flipped organic chemistry course. Bridge activities form the basis of an initial interactive discussion to activate students' prior knowledge and encourage meaningful learning. This paper…

Example-based learning often uses a design in which learners first receive basic instructional explanations of new principles and concepts and then examples thereof. In this sequence, it is crucial that learners self-explain by using the content of the basic instructional explanations to elaborate on the examples. Typically, learners are not…

Science students' study success rates in the first year of higher education (FYHE) are problematic. Although a considerable amount of previous research has been carried out to investigate the determinants of students' academic achievement in FYHE, there has been little discussion about the incremental value of non-cognitive factors over and above…

The present study defined three levels of contextualized media and investigated their influences on students' science attitudes, comprehension, and argumentation. To achieve the purpose, an online game-based science argumentation (OGSA) program was developed for the experiments (N = 148). The OGSA included three versions for student argumentation…