This study focuses on the relationship between students' use of language resources and their conceptualisation of phenomena in producing scientific explanations in physics. The objectives are to find out if there is a general model that describe the meaning-making process, the extent that this model is applicable to various branches in physics.…

Chemical reasoning, and in particular structure--property reasoning, is an important goal of chemistry education. Johnstone's triangle (1982, 1991) is often used to explicate this type of reasoning. This triangle describes the multilevel thought chemical reasoning requires and shows why students find chemistry so difficult. However, this model…

This study examined student language in learning the human circulatory system, to understand the challenges they face in representing the knowledge in this topic. Data for this study comprised students' written responses to a range of structured test items. Responses to 17 test items from 70 students across four classes were analysed using tools…

Chemical thinking has been widely recognized as a core competence that students develop in chemistry education. This study examined the distribution and representation forms of chemical thinking in the five Chinese high school chemistry textbooks aligned with the new national standards in Mainland China. We employed the framework of essential…

While there has been much interest in the power of student-generated multiple representations to promote student reasoning and conceptual understanding, most studies of student explanations have been of written artefacts or only included diagrams as an adjunct to written explanations. This approach may be because teachers do not have an accessible…

The construction of dynamic multimedia products requires the selection and integration of a range of semiotic resources. As an assessment task for preservice teachers, this construction process is complex but has significant potential for learning. To investigate how weaving together multiple representations in such tasks enables learners to…

Many researchers have reported that bridging analogies can productively support students' scientific meaning-making. How this can be understood semiotically is, however, not well understood. This research followed an ethnographic case study approach to investigate Year 11 students meaning-making through a process of transduction (Kress, 2000;…

Practices such as astrology or crystal healing can be defined as pseudoscience. Against pseudoscience, one of the major responsibilities of science education must be to develop science-literate individuals who are able to understand what science is, how science is undertaken, how scientific knowledge is constructed, and how it is justified, then…

Learning analytics, referring to the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts in order to optimize learning and the environments in which it occurs, is proving to be a powerful approach for understanding and improving science learning. However, few studies focused on leveraging learning analytics…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Mathematics Infusion into Science Project (MiSP), which integrated science and mathematics in an engaging middle school science curriculum that fostered improvements in science content knowledge, higher-level problem solving, and affective domains related to mathematics. The project design was based…

The aim of this study was to investigate whether and how engaging with a computer-supported collaborative knowledge-building environment helps students to develop a more sophisticated approach to scientific inquiry. A total of 52 undergraduate students took a course entitled "Introduction to Natural Sciences" that was based on…

A large body of work has been devoted to reducing assessment biases that distort inferences about students' science understanding, particularly in multiple-choice instruments (MCI). Constructed-response instruments (CRI), however, have invited much less scrutiny, perhaps because of their reputation for avoiding many of the documented biases of…

Integration of technology, social learning and scientific models offers pedagogical opportunities for science education. A particularly interesting area is thermal science, where students often struggle with abstract concepts, such as heat. In taking on this conceptual obstacle, we explore how hand-held infrared (IR) visualization technology can…

The main purposes of this study were to identify Taiwanese university students' physics learning profiles in terms of their critical conceptions of learning physics and to compare their physics learning self-efficacy with the different learning profiles. A total of 250 Taiwanese undergraduates who were majoring in physics participated in this…

This paper reports on 6-11-year-old children's "sayings and doings" (Harré 2002) as they explore molecule artefacts in dialectical-interactive teaching interviews (Fleer, "Cultural Studies of Science Education" 3:781-786, 2008; Hedegaard et al. 2008). This sociocultural study was designed to explore children's…