The difference between students' ideas and scientific conceptions, is called misconceptions. Physics learning needs to be designed by teachers to eradicate misconceptions. This paper provides a review of 72 international journal articles on diagnosis methods, causes, and ways of remediating misconceptions that have been published between…

The past [approximately]15 years have seen increasing interest in defining disciplinary core concepts. Within the field of physiology, Michael, McFarland, Modell, and colleagues have published studies that defined physiology core concepts and have elaborated many of these as detailed conceptual frameworks. With such helpful definitions now in…

Phylogenetic trees are important tools for teaching and understanding evolution, yet students struggle to read and interpret them correctly. In this study, we extend a study conducted by Catley and Novick (2008) by investigating depictions of evolutionary trees in US textbooks. We investigated 1197 diagrams from 11 German and 11 United States…

In this article, we present the question of our didactic research on the relative conceptual evolution and transition from high school to university in Morocco. We focused on the difficulties encountered by students in the first year of the Physics Sciences using a questionnaire which aims at evaluating the evolution of the concept of…

Many university-level electrical engineering courses continue to use textbooks as curriculum scaffolds, prescribed texts, and/or reference volumes. Textbook reliance is even more pronounced in courses that teach foundational principles of the discipline, such as introductory circuit theory. This paper reports on the conceptual coverage of…

Understanding genetic drift is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of biology, yet it is difficult to learn because it combines the conceptual challenges of both evolution and randomness. To help assess strategies for teaching genetic drift, we have developed and evaluated the Genetic Drift Inventory (GeDI), a concept inventory that measures…

This study aims to analyse prospective chemistry teachers' cognitive structure related to the subject of covalent and ionic bonding. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants in order to determine their cognitive structure, and the interviews were audio recorded to prevent the loss of data. The data were transcribed and…

This is our fourth paper in our five paper series describing our national study of general education astronomy students' conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. While previous papers in this series focused on the processes by which we collected and quantitatively analyzed our data, this paper presents the most common pre-instruction…

Twenty-four free-response questions were developed to explore introductory college astronomy students' understanding of gravity in a variety of contexts, including in and around Earth, throughout the solar system, and in hypothetical situations. Questions were separated into three questionnaires, each of which was given to a section of…

New science standards and reform recommendations spanning grades K--16 focus on a limited set of key scientific concepts from each discipline that all students should know. They also emphasize the integration of these concepts with science practices so that students learn not only the "what" of science but also the "how" and…

A prior study showed that students best make predictions about the outcome of opening a valve between two flasks containing a fluid or vacuum when they view both a demonstration video and a particulate animation, but the study showed no influence from the order in which these visualizations were used. The purpose of this current research was to…

This study examined whether reading a refutational or non-refutational text would induce different cognitive processing, as revealed by eye-movement analyses. Unlike a standard expository text, a refutational text acknowledges a reader's alternative conceptions about a topic, refutes them, and then introduces scientific conceptions as viable…

An exploratory study was conducted with 23 organic chemistry educators to discover what general chemistry concepts they typically review, the concepts they believe are fundamental to introductory organic chemistry, the topics students find most difficult in the subject, and the misconceptions they observe in undergraduate organic chemistry…

Despite concerted efforts by science educators to understand patterns of evolutionary reasoning in science students and teachers, the vast majority of evolution education studies have failed to carefully consider or control for item feature effects in knowledge measurement. Our study explores whether robust contextualization patterns emerge within…

Seventy-nine studies in geoscience conceptions appeared in peer-reviewed publications in English from 1982 through July 2009. Summaries of the 79 studies suggest certain recurring themes across subject areas: issues with terms, scale (temporal and spatial), role of prior experience, and incorrect application of everyday knowledge to geoscience…