This work reports the development and application of an analytical tool for the analysis of the formation of the scientific mind of students who took part in inquiry activities, based on the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard, in a Chemistry Club. For the construction of the analytical instrument, an extracurricular course was offered to first-year…

Even though the concept of species is central in biology, the history of species concept and the existence of different species concepts are rarely discussed in biology classroom. This is unfortunate, as teachers could use the plurality of species concepts to enrich discussion in the classroom. Therefore, knowing the students' perception of…

This article presents an analysis of students' conceptual understanding of technology. The study focused on two groups of seventh-grade students located in Bogotá, Colombia, living in rural and urban areas and participating in activities developed in a virtual learning network. The methods used in this study followed grounded theory (Strauss &…

Technical artifacts play a central role in teaching and learning about technology. The artifact exemplars used in the classroom to illustrate and discuss various technological concepts should therefore be carefully chosen in order to actually support the abstraction and successful transfer of these concepts. Research from the learning and…

Most junior high school students considered chemistry as a complicated science subject with an abstract concept, symbols, and terms that must be memorized. The difficulty of learning chemistry made students had low positive perceptions of chemistry. It was needed the right ways to introduce chemistry to them. The purpose of the multiple case study…

The purpose of the present study is to reveal the metaphorical perceptions of prospective Turkish teachers' related to the concept of "language." The study was carried out with 158 prospective Turkish teachers' ongoing Gaziantep University, Faculty of Education, Department of Turkish Language Teaching in 2014-2015 academic year. To…

Although the benefits of addressing cognitive, social and affective aspects of learning in order to support conceptual change have been discussed in the literature, there are few studies of such interventions in the normal classroom. This study used a multidimensional conceptual change framework in order to teach five biology and physics topics…

Prior studies have shown that students have difficulty understanding the role of mutation in evolution and genetics. However, little is known about unifying themes underlying students' difficulty with mutation. In this study, we examined students' written explanations about mutation from a cognitive science perspective. According to one cognitive…

Purpose: Given that prior research has confirmed that students' mathematics values significantly affect their mathematics learning, understanding how students' values form and change, especially during different learning stages, is an important topic. Design/Approach/Methods: This study administered a questionnaire to investigate the values of…

Comprehensive understanding of complex biological systems necessitates the use of computational models because they facilitate visualisation and interrogation of system dynamics and data-driven analysis. Computational model-based (CMB) activities have demonstrated effectiveness in improving students' understanding and their ability to use and…

Concepts change into mental images through individuals' experiences. Therefore, mental images can differ from culture to culture. This study aims to analyse students' mental images of cigarette through metaphors. This research uses phenomenology, one of qualitative research designs. The study group was composed of 986 secondary school, high school…

Although the study of epistemic beliefs has received growing interest in the past decades, this research tends to focus on high school and undergraduate students, and does not address beliefs about information and truth, concepts that have been regarded as critical for learners in 21st-century educational contexts. In this study, the authors…

A qualitative research approach was chosen to analyse the conceptions of pupils attending elementary school from Canada (N = 135), France (N = 30) and Morocco (N = 92) between 10 and 12 years of age. Their conceptions were identified while being mobilised on energy transformations during the working of a simple electric circuit made of a battery,…

In this study, artificial neural networks are suggested as a model that can be "trained" to yield qualitative results out of a huge amount of categorical data. It can be said that this is a new approach applied in educational qualitative data analysis. In this direction, a cascade-forward back-propagation neural network (CFBPN) model was…

Some curricular elements are threshold concepts that involve "troublesome knowledge," not because they are difficult for students to comprehend per se, but because they are challenging for students to fully appreciate. In this article, we suggest that entrepreneurial failure is a threshold concept in entrepreneurship courses because…