When people perceive the world, what they see is based on the physics of light reflecting off surfaces and entering their eyes. Their brain then processes the raw data so that photoreceptor activity becomes perceptual awareness. Most textbooks and chapters on sensation and perception follow this formula, building student understanding of…

The purpose of this study was to explore how students interacted with guidance to conduct a scientific inquiry in a physics simulation by using the eye-tracking techniques. The participants were 51 7th graders, and an eye-tracking system was used to record their visual behaviors and log data while they were using the simulation. As for data…

The incandescent bulb has been a useful tool for teaching basic electrical circuits, as brightness is related to the current or power flowing through a bulb. This has led to the development of qualitative pedagogical treatments for examining resistive combinations in simple circuits using bulbs and batteries, which were first introduced by James…

Promoting students' ability to engage in discipline-specific practices is a central goal of chemistry education. Yet if instruction is to meaningfully foster such ability, we must first understand students' reasoning during these practices. By characterizing constraints on chemistry students' reasoning, we can design instruction that targets this…

This column provides background science information for elementary teachers. This month's issue helps teachers to understand color mixing so that they can teach this information to students.

We study the misconceptions about colour that most people hold, determining the general phenomenological laws that govern them. Concept mapping was used to combat the misconceptions which were found in the application of a test specifically designed to determine these misconceptions, while avoiding the possible misleading inductions that could…

The effect of background color on the perception of color by students is discussed. Explanations on why students only see certain colors when viewing colored marks on a blackboard through different color filters are provided. (KR)