This study aimed to examine the views of preservice science teachers on concept map use in a General Chemistry II class. The study was conducted with 47 preservice science teachers. In the study, an interview form grounded on determining their views on concept maps and comprised of open-ended questions, was used as the data collection tool. In…

The properties and functions of complex systems apply across a variety of domains of science and are at the heart of the solutions to many global crises facing the world today. As such, understanding of complex systems has been increasingly recognized as a core goal of science education. Learning about complexity-related concepts and phenomena is…

Biology is an essential and compulsory subject offered at all senior high schools in Ghana. However, the level of students' attitude towards biology has been seen to be a result of the use of less motivating teachers' instructional strategies. This research study examined the effect of concept mapping and cooperative learning strategies on…

The purpose of this article is to describe the possibilities of using worksheets in the teaching of lipids and proteins. The worksheet includes a concept map, suggestions for three safe experiments that can be performed with available household chemicals, and observation results. The worksheets were implemented into action research in two classes…

Helping students to understand complex processes is one of the core challenges in teaching biology courses. Concept mapping is a flexible pedagogical method that enables students to learn the complexities of a given subject while at the same time being versatile enough that instructors can easily pivot between instructional modalities and/or…

This study aims to develop, implement, and evaluate an instructional design model to enhance the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of physics student teachers. Model development is accomplished in five stages over two years: 1) problem identification, 2) preliminary identification of the product and design concepts, 3) preliminary theories and…

Developing students' ability to think about systems, as opposed to isolated facts, is of central importance in much of science teaching. Prior work in this area has focused on students' recognition of the processes occurring within a system. Comparatively, little work has been done on how students organise the objects that are contained within the…

Learning progressions (LPs) are descriptions of students' growing sophistication in the understanding of a particular construct through a curricular sequence. They are particularly useful for organizing complex constructs for which students do not necessarily connect concepts as taught in different courses. However, they are challenging to…

There is widespread evidence showing that concept maps are effective for learning. However, little is known about the effects of various concept map activities. We conducted an experiment to examine the comparative effectiveness of three concept map activities: (1) translating a complete map to a paragraph format; (2) filling in concepts in a…

This study examined the effect of mind mapping instructional strategy on students' retention in physics in senior secondary schools. The research is a quasi-experimental design of the pre-test, post-test, non-equivalent and non-randomized 2 X 2 X 3 factorial design. 64 students were sampled for this study out of which 28 formed the experimental…

Concept mapping instructional strategy is one of the innovations in the teaching and learning of science and biology in particular. Previous studies have reported that teachers and students experienced difficulties in the use of concept mapping. Hence, this study investigated the effects of Concept-mapping instructional strategy on senior…

The research practices of academics of science teaching and learning (academics-"of-st&l") may be considered a connected, constructed landscape, the peaks of which are shaped by accumulation of like practices. Entangling interviews with twenty-seven academics-"of-st&l" and document analyses, in this paper I map the…

This study evaluates the use of an open-ended question to determine students' knowledge structure on the topic of galvanic cells. The open-ended question was developed and administered to 163 Grade 10 students who had earlier completed a course on electrochemistry. Students' responses were marked as well as coded on the basis of the fields…

One challenge associated with introducing systems thinking in chemistry classrooms is the increase in content complexity that students face when they engage in this type of approach. Placing core chemical ideas within larger systems has promise, as long as students are not overwhelmed by the added complexity. Although there are many potential…

We present the development and validation of a construct map addressing introductory quantum mechanics topics at the high school level, as a subset of a larger learning progression on quantum mechanics. Topics include energy quantization, photon absorption and emission, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, atom stability, orbitals, wave function,…