This qualitative, ethnographic study focuses on how combining aspects of visual learning with a social media application (app)--Instagram--can be a useful learning tool for digital natives (DNs). Current students are classified as digital natives because they are inundated with technology, which has become an essential tool in their everyday…

Although acoustics examples and demonstrations can be an effective tool for engaging students in introductory physics classes and outreach, teaching principles of sound and vibration to the deaf and hard of hearing needs to be approached carefully. The deaf and hard of hearing have less intuition with sound but are no strangers to some of the…

Even after you have decided to tackle a problem like racial equity, it may seem daunting to broach the subject in a physics classroom. After all, the idea of a (typically White) instructor in power tackling a sensitive topic such as social justice can be scary in any (mostly White) classroom. Not only that, but physics is typically viewed as a…

Research on mechanistic thinking in organic chemistry has shown that students attribute little meaning to the electron-pushing (i.e., curved arrow) formalism. At the University of Ottawa, a new curriculum has been developed in which students are taught the electron-pushing formalism prior to instruction on specific reactions--this formalism is…

This study investigates classroom organisation and interaction focusing on phases of activity. The detailed in-depth case study is based on video recordings of 1 science unit consisting of 11 lessons about biological evolution in a Swedish ninth-grade class (aged 15). The study illuminates the temporality of student participation as a fundamental…

The unfortunate negative attitude toward physics among many students, including science majors, warrants creative approaches to teaching required physics courses. One such approach is to integrate science fiction into the curriculum, either in the form of movies or the written word. Historically this has been done since at least the 1970s, and by…

This paper reports on a teacher's and his students' responsiveness to a new tetrahedral-oriented (Mahaffy in "J Chem Educ" 83(1):49-55, 2006) curriculum requiring more discursive classroom practices in the teaching of chemistry. In this instrumental case study, we identify the intentions of this learner-centered curriculum and…

Organic chemistry problems that interrelate and integrate synthesis with spectroscopy are presented. These synthesis-spectroscopy roadmap (SSR) problems uniquely engage second-year undergraduate organic chemistry students in the personal discovery of organic chemistry. SSR problems counter the memorize-or-bust strategy that many students tend to…

Road map problems ask students to integrate their knowledge of organic reactions with pattern recognition skills to "fill in the blanks" in the synthesis of an organic compound. Students are asked to identify familiar organic reactions in unfamiliar contexts. A practical context, such as a medicinally useful target compound, helps…

One challenge in science education assessment is that students often focus on surface features of questions rather than the underlying scientific principles. We investigated how student written responses to constructed-response questions about photosynthesis vary based on two surface features of the question: the species of plant and the order of…

In this study we investigated the pedagogical context of whole-class teaching with computer simulations. We examined relations between the attitudes and learning goals of teachers and their students regarding the use of simulations in whole-class teaching, and how teachers implement these simulations in their teaching practices. We observed…

Identifying an instructional tool for merging scientific and indigenous knowledge (IK) is problematic as there is no clear guidance on how this can be achieved. Argumentation is recommended as a possible integrative instructional theoretical methodology as it imbues notions of dialogue and persuasion, while at the same time embracing the…

There is on-going international interest in the relationships between assessment instruments, students' understanding of science concepts and context-based curriculum approaches. This study extends earlier research showing that students can develop connections between contexts and concepts--called "fluid transitions"--when studying…

Online video lectures have been considered an instructional media for various pedagogic approaches, such as the flipped classroom and open online courses. In comparison to other instructional media, online video affords the opportunity for recording student clickstream patterns within a video lecture. Video analytics within lecture videos may…

The purpose of this researching study was to develop a teaching proposal and investigate the conceptualizations that children make about the processes of plants (photosynthesis, respiration, transpiration). We undertook an innovative implementation on teaching living things to students of 10 to 11 years old (5th grade). The theoretical framework…