An active learning sequence based on the predict-observe-explain teaching strategy is applied to a lesson on buoyant force. The results obtained clearly justify the use of this teaching method and suggest devising a series of activities to enable more effective removal of students' commonly held alternative conceptions regarding floating and…

This research examined whether a memorable and unexpected change (deviation details) presented during 1 instance of a repeated event facilitated children's memory for that instance and whether a repeated event facilitated children's memory for deviation details. In Experiments 1 and 2, 8-year-olds (N = 167) watched 1 or 4 live magic shows.…

In 4 experiments, participants viewed a short video-based lesson about how the Doppler effect works. Some students viewed already-drawn diagrams while listening to a concurrent oral explanation, whereas other students listened to the same explanation while viewing the instructor actually draw the diagrams by hand. All students then completed…

Children are ubiquitous imitators, but how do they decide which actions to imitate? One possibility is that children rationally combine multiple sources of information about which actions are necessary to cause a particular outcome. For instance, children might learn from contingencies between action sequences and outcomes across repeated…

This research, carried out in Greece on pupils aged 12-16, focuses on the transformation of their representations concerning light emission and image formation by extended light sources. The instructive process was carried out in two stages, each one having a different, distinct target set. During the first stage, the appropriate conflict…

The notions of "idealisation" and "approximation" are strongly linked to the question of "how our theories represent the phenomena in their scope". Although there is no consensus amongst Philosophers on the nature of the process of idealisation and how it affects theoretical representation, at the level of science education much can be gained from…

The present paper reports the design process and the experimentation of a teaching-learning sequence about the concept of mechanical wave propagation and the role played by media where waves are propagating. The sequence focuses on the central issue of the relationships between observable phenomena, like macroscopic behaviours of waves, and their…

The 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Optics Velley Kingdom Plaza Hotel, Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. This years conference features two invited talks by: Dr. Jie Tang, Associate Professor with the Department of Computer…