This paper reports the findings of a quasi-experimental study that investigated the impacts of effective group work on Hong Kong science classrooms. One hundred and fifty-two Secondary 2 (or Grade 8) students from two schools participated in a teaching intervention (comprising 16 lessons) in which they studied the topic 'Making Use of Electricity'…

Despite efforts to make school science appealing, students' negative attitude toward it persists globally. This qualitative study elucidates how and why undergraduate students in Japan had declining attitudes toward school science during primary and secondary school. Twenty-two first- and second-year students at a Japanese national university…

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…

This study explored the interplay between science teachers' pedagogical beliefs, scientific evidence, and diversity. This study adopts a sociocultural view of science that views science as a cultural way of knowing, and acknowledges that it is laden with cultural understandings, interpretations, and a language of its own. This paper reports…

Understanding how teaching affects students' attitudes and beliefs is notoriously difficult, specifically in a quickly evolving and societally relevant field such as genetics. The aim of this survey study is to capitalize our previous research and examine how teaching relates to Finnish secondary school students' liking of, self-concept in and…

Troubleshooting activities require students to diagnose teacher-crafted erroneous examples by detecting and explaining the conceptual errors driving them. In a previous study, the author tested whether diagnosing erroneous examples and then scoring them using a rubric that contained the related worked examples, a step-by-step strategy to solve a…

While helping students develop informed views about nature of scientific inquiry (VNOSI) has been emphasised in science education, little is known regarding students' current VNOSI at a certain grade level and whether there was evidence of higher attainment of VNOSI in students in higher grades as compared to lower grades? The purpose of this…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of the advance organiser model (AOM) on students' academic achievement in learning work and energy. The design of the study was quasi-experimental pretest-posttest nonequivalent control groups. The total population of the study was 139 students of three sections in Endabaguna…

Studies have shown the potential of explainer videos. An alternative is a written explanation, as found in science textbooks. Prior research suggests that instructional explanations sometimes lead to the belief that a topic has been fully understood, even though that is, not the case. This 'illusion of understanding' may be affected by the medium…

Although efforts are being made to bring science closer to secondary school students, science is still mostly perceived within stereotypic frameworks, hindering students' identification with it. In this paper, we claim the role that arts-based approaches can play in science education to break these biased views and understandings and generate a…

The study of questions has occupied a prominent role in the research into classroom discourse. For science teaching, questions are fundamental since they can connect students with the patterns of scientific thinking. In this article, we developed analytical tools to investigate the epistemic dimension of questions in chemistry teaching. We draw…

The purposes of this study were to (1) investigate 127 high school students' views about scientific inquiry at different grade levels, and (2) to describe factors such as the teacher's views about scientific inquiry, his teaching, and his curriculum that facilitated or constrained students' views about scientific inquiry. The majority of students…

The importance of attitudes and other variables of the affective domain in education is acknowledged for a long time. In this study, we used an attitude questionnaire to survey 498 Portuguese 9th-grade students to determine the predictive ability of the attitudes towards the discipline of Physics-chemistry on school achievement. Possible gender…

Scientific inquiry activities are considered as productive science instruction to improve students' science learning and achievement. Supportive teacher-student relationships and positive disciplinary climate in the classroom are also two important factors that could facilitate student learning. This study investigates whether the association…

Spatial reasoning is a critical skill in the Geosciences. Using a randomized control study with 592 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory and advanced Geology courses, our data indicates that regular, short interventions throughout an academic semester improve students' spatial thinking skills significantly with a moderate to large…