The study outlines the early-stage development of a free-response General Relativity Concept Inventory (GRCI), an educational instrument designed to test for conceptual understanding of General Relativity. Data were collected for the study by having 26 participants from General Relativity courses work through the questions on the GRCI. Interviews…

Students often use incoherent strategies in their problem solving involving force and motion, as revealed, e.g. when they are asked to draw force diagrams for amusement rides involving circular motion, whether in horizontal or vertical planes. Depending on the questions asked, assignments involving circular motion can reveal different types of…

Future teachers face the challenge of whether and how to address their students' misconceptions--naïve concepts that often conflict with the correct scientific concepts taught at school. We developed a short-term digital training intervention on instructional knowledge about strategies for addressing students' misconceptions in physics. It…

Students come to their high school physics classroom with experiences and knowledge that can be used to help explain physics concepts, but those experiences may not fully align with the scientifically accepted science concept. When there is a misalignment between a student's prior knowledge and the scientifically accepted concept a misconception…

Several studies compared three different types of questions (conceptual, algorithmic, and graphical) across various topics, however, few focused specifically on gifted students. This study addressed this gap. The aim of the study, hence, was to determine whether there were notable differences in gifted students' performance in the three types of…

Contextual features of assessments can influence the ideas students draw from and the ways they assemble knowledge. We used a mixed-methods approach to explore how surface-level item context impacts student reasoning. In study 1, we developed an isomorphic survey to capture student reasoning about fluid dynamics, a crosscutting phenomenon, in two…

Research on students' thinking about the particulate nature of matter has shown that students find it difficult to connect the macroscopic with the sub microscopic world. Although they have heard about atoms, students stay within a continuous model of matter or attribute macroscopic properties to particles. The research presented focuses on the…

In this research, it was aimed to analyze the problem solving strategies used during solving problems related to constant speed and constant acceleration motion, which are often used in graphs, according to the presentation of the problem (text and graph). The research was carried out with 119 students studying in the 11th grade. In the research…

In this study, we have explored the effectiveness of two instructional approaches in the context of the motion of objects falling at terminal speed in the presence of air resistance. We ground these instructional approaches in dual-process theories of reasoning, which assert that human cognition relies on two thinking processes. Dual-process…

Even after research-based instruction, students who demonstrate the ability to assemble relevant conceptual knowledge on one physics question may have difficulty assembling that same knowledge on a closely related problem. Recent research has suggested that reflexive, bottom-up reasoning processes seemingly unrelated to the physics concepts…

Cognitive neuroscience methods can identify the fMRI-measured neural representation of familiar individual concepts, such as apple, and decompose them into meaningful neural and semantic components. This approach was applied here to determine the neural representations and underlying dimensions of representation of far more abstract physics…

Student awareness and selection of learning strategies are predictors of academic success. Yet, little is known about learning strategies of students in university preparation science courses, who are frequently mature-aged or underrepresented students. This lack of knowledge potentially hinders tailoring reflective learning experiences, specific…

The present study contributes to the understanding of physics students' representational competence by examining specific bodily practices (e.g. gestures, enactment) of students' interaction and constructions of representations in relation to a digital learning environment. We present and analyse video data of upper-secondary school students'…

The most recent science education reform, the Next Generation Science Standards (NRC, 2012) set forth a new and ambitious agenda for science education. These standards go beyond all of the previous versions and combine three dimensions: disciplinary core ideas, science practices and crosscutting concepts. They call on teachers to recognizing and…

In physics and chemistry, the development of problem-solving skills is necessary to become an expert. A simple cognitive model to analyse such development is proposed and tested. An exploratory research was conducted with expert professors and students in initial and advanced years. A think aloud procedure was used to obtain relevant data while…