Chemistry as a subject is difficult to learn and understand, due in part to the specific language used by practitioners in their professional and scientific communications. The language and ways of representing chemical interactions have been grouped into three modes of representation used by chemistry instructors, and ultimately by students in…

Although a large part the Physics Education Research (PER) literature investigates students' conceptual understanding in physics, these investigations focus on qualitative, conceptual reasoning. Even in modeling expert problem solving, attention to conceptual understanding means a focus on initial qualitative analysis of the problem; the equations…

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…

The perceptions of a group of 5-6-year olds were tested against two disparate hypotheses, one for nested hierarchies, the other for symbolic representations in language and learning. There is evidence that young children have the foundation for tackling more sophisticated and challenging ideas than is usually recognised. Linguistically, children…

The articles in the collection discuss the theory and practice of seven Educational Sciences. These are the basic elements of a conceptual framework for the education profession proposed by Joseph E. Hill in the belief that if educators are to establish mutual understandings of educational problems and phenomena, a unifying conceptual framework…