We investigate an interactive teacher-generated drawing strategy in which the teacher constructs a drawing with the help of the students. The students contribute their ideas on how to visualize to-be-drawn concepts, embedded in an interactive process. The present study explored whether learning from a scientific text on plate tectonics could be…

Current science education efforts emphasise the need to train students to understand the nature of scientific work. In geosciences, training students to understand how science works does not only promote their interest and community engagement in the field, but also has the potential to promote awareness and ethics. However, instructional…

Many geoscience phenomena cannot be perceived at human temporal or spatial scales. As a consequence, we can only understand many processes that drive geological phenomena through analogical reasoning. Building deep conceptual understanding requires instruction that activates the appropriate source analogs and allows students to build useful…

There is a need for research-informed instructional approaches that promote school students' deep conceptual understanding of abstract geological concepts. Given that a type of learner-constructed stop-motion animation, 'slowmation', has been shown to offer affordances for learning in science preservice teacher education, we extended its…

There are ongoing calls for research that identifies students' conceptions about geographical phenomena. In response, this study investigates junior secondary school students' (N = 95) conceptions about plate tectonics. Student response data was generated from semi-structured interviews-about-instances and a two-tiered multiple-choice test…

Giant exploding volcanoes...asteroids crashing into Earth...continents floating across the oceans...massive pools of lava...violent earthquakes splitting continents--middle school students hold a variety of ideas about Earth, how it has changed over time, and what has caused these changes. Listening to students talk about how the world works is…