The role of scientific reasoning in promoting scientific literacy during the early years of schooling is well acknowledged. Using the analytical framework for scientific reasoning skills by A. Opitz et al. (2017, "Educational Research and Evaluation," 23(3-4), 78-101), this multi-age observational study investigated the extent of…

Solving organic chemistry reactions requires reasoning with multiple concepts and data (i.e., multivariate reasoning). However, studies have reported that organic chemistry students typically demonstrate univariate reasoning. Case comparisons, where students compare two or more tasks, have been reported to support students' multivariate reasoning.…

Nowadays, physics learning in the classroom should no longer only focus on achieving academics. It must prepare students to face challenges in the future. One of the abilities that are important for learners is problem solving, and the problem-solving ability that is becoming increasingly important in today's digital era is computational thinking…

The field of anatomy is often seen by nonanatomists as concerned primarily with the tasks of locating, naming, and describing structures; these tasks, in turn, are often assumed to require only lower-order cognitive skills (LOCSs), i.e., the Knowledge or Comprehension levels of Bloom's taxonomy. Many nonanatomists may thus believe that studying…

In upper-secondary chemistry education, the concept of 'Amount of Substance' occupies a central position within the computation framework. However, comprehending this concept often poses a challenge for students. To address this issue, our study aimed to design and implement a computation skills test to assess the varying levels of students'…

Science education researchers have highlighted how uncertainty can foster meaningful scientific sense-making, supporting students to re-evaluate their understandings of scientific phenomena and pursue deeper causal accounts. However, facilitating whole-class conversations motivated by uncertainty is complex and challenging, calling for further…

Analytical questions are the types of questions that can lead students to gain an understanding of a concept and explore reasoning. This research is a descriptive, qualitative study investigating the emergence of analytical questions and their interaction patterns in group discussions facilitated by a scientific approach to learning. The subjects…

A revised version of a traditional physical chemistry laboratory experiment has been developed to enhance student discussion in the laboratory and to improve students' connections between physical chemistry concepts and real molecular systems. In this experiment, students explore the keto-enol tautomerization of 2,4-pentanedione. However, unlike…

This study investigates if collaboration and the level of heterogeneity between collaborating partners' problem-solving scripts can influence the extent to which pre-service teachers engage in evidence-based reasoning when analyzing and solving pedagogical problem cases. We operationalized evidence-based reasoning through its content and process…

Scientific thinking is considered as a cognitive process in which the underlying causes of a basic problem are solved. It is of great importance for teachers to have scientific thinking skills to improve their professional lives, to create effective learning environments, to continuously question the events and processes in the classroom, to carry…

As a "wicked problem," climate change requires interdisciplinary understanding and collaboration in order to prepare future leaders to develop solutions. To this end, as an ecologist and an anthropologist at a mid-sized university in the southeastern U.S., we designed a pair of interdisciplinary, research-intensive courses for first-year…

Background: The competencies for the 21st century are defined as a broad and interrelated system of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes enabling the full application of man in personal and professional life. Regarding the science education competencies combining science and scientific knowledge, as well as skills such as inquiry, critical…

Transfer is not static but a dynamic process of learning. In this article, the concept of transfer and the implications of its study are reconsidered from the theoretical basis of the complex dynamic system approach. We describe "transfer" as an emergent process that implies not a copy of knowledge applied to a new situation, but a new…

We present a framework designed to help categorize various sense making moves, allowing for greater specificity in describing and understanding student reasoning and also in the development of curriculum to support this reasoning. The framework disaggregates between the mechanisms of student reasoning (the cognitive "tool" that they are…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Mathematics Infusion into Science Project (MiSP), which integrated science and mathematics in an engaging middle school science curriculum that fostered improvements in science content knowledge, higher-level problem solving, and affective domains related to mathematics. The project design was based…