Many education researchers have advocated grounding abstract mathematical and scientific concepts in students' lived experiences, environmental interactions, and perceptions. This dissertation explores the causal effects of various grounding strategies in instructional settings, specifically on the topic of statistical sampling. The first chapter…

Chemistry is considered a difficult subject by most students. Its difficulty lies in Chemistry's complex and abstract nature. This highly abstract nature requires constant interplay and coordination between the macroscopic, particulate, and symbolic representations. Experts can successfully navigate the various representations without overloading…

The education system evolves and transforms towards interactive and immersive learning tools in this digital age. Augmented reality has also evolved as a ubiquitous, robust, and effective technology for providing innovative educational tools. In engineering education, many abstract concepts require technological intervention for conceptual…

Model-based instruction offers numerous benefits to students, including increased content knowledge and critical thinking. This study explored the differences in the knowledge outcomes and reasoning processes employed by undergraduate students in an introductory biology lab as they constructed, revised, and simulated a computational model of a…

Scientific reasoning is particularly pertinent to science education since it is closely related to the content and methodologies of science and contributes to scientific literacy. Much of the research in science education investigates the appropriate framework and teaching methods and tools needed to promote students' ability to reason and…

Teaching introductory statistics using curricula focused on modeling and simulation is becoming increasingly common in introductory statistics courses and touted as a more beneficial approach for fostering students' statistical thinking. Yet, surprisingly little research has been conducted to study the impact of modeling and simulation curricula…

Simulation and modeling activities, a key point of computational thinking, are currently not being integrated into the science classroom. This paper describes a new visual programming tool entitled the Simulation Creation Toolkit. The Simulation Creation Toolkit is a high level pattern-based phenomenological approach to bringing rapid simulation…

When students reason during school science, they often refer to conceptions that are derived from out-of-school experiences and are poor proxies for science orthodoxy. However, for some areas of science, these conceptions represent only a proportion of students' full conceptual knowledge, for tacit understanding exists that is superior to the…

As teachers of political theory, our goal is not merely to help students understand the abstract reasoning behind key ideas and texts of our discipline. We also wish to convey the historical contexts that informed these ideas and texts, including the political aims of their authors. But the traditional lecture-and-discussion approach tends to…

While many researchers in science education have argued that students' epistemological understanding of models and of modelling processes would influence their cognitive processing on a modelling task, there has been little direct evidence for such an effect. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relation between students' epistemological…

This paper describes the effects of learning support on simulation-based learning in three learning models: experiment prompting, a hypothesis menu, and step guidance. A simulation learning system was implemented based on these three models, and the differences between simulation-based learning and traditional laboratory learning were explored in…

The teaching and learning of statistics has impacted the curriculum in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education. Because of this growing movement to expand and include statistics into all levels of education, there is also a considerable interest in how to teach statistics. For statistics concepts that tend to be very difficult or…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of three instructional methods and conceptual systems orientation on achievement in a freshman general chemistry laboratory course. Traditional approach, learning cycle, and computer simulations are discussed. (KR)

This 10-day study compared the effects of alternative ways of using microcomputer simulations on the achievement and attitudes of sixth- and seventh-grade science students (N=173). Nine classes were randomly assigned to one of four treatments: (1) microcomputer simulations; (2) laboratory activities; (3) a combination of simulation and laboratory…