No matter your opinion on religion, whether you are a staunch believer or an unapologetic atheist, that phrase "God's thoughts" is a delightfully poetic one. It represents in a metaphorical way nothing less than an understanding of the deepest and most fundamental laws of the universe. Specifically, the hope is that we will one day be…

Teaching and learning situations nowadays typically build on richly illustrated material or multimodal presentations. Under these circumstances, the transparency of images and models used for explaining various phenomena becomes central. The present study deals with 20 Swedish children, 9-12 years old, discussing an illustration meant to show the…

Online videos are an increasingly important way technology is contributing to the improvement of physics teaching. Students and teachers have begun to rely on online videos to provide them with content knowledge and instructional strategies. Online audiences are expecting greater production value, and departments are sometimes requesting educators…

The upcoming Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse, with its 70-mile wide path of totality stretching across much of North America, provides us with a unique opportunity to teach students about eclipses. One might naturally assume that students have little difficulty understanding the nature of eclipses. After all, the notion that eclipses occur when…

Various experiments and demonstrations relate air pressure and air pressure difference to force and area. Carpenter and Minnix describe a large-scale pneumatic lift in which a person sitting on a board atop a plastic garbage bag is lifted when the bag is connected to the exhaustport of a vacuum cleaner, which easily lifts the person. This article…

Evolution has been positioned at the centre of conflict between scientific and religious explanations of the workings of the world. However, little research has examined other possible reasons for some people rejecting scientific explanations. The author's research indicates that for some people, irrespective of faith, the ideas associated with…

Physics education research has a tradition of studying problem solving, exploring themes such as physical intuition and differences between expert and novice problem solvers. However, most of this work has focused on traditional, or well-structured, problems, similar to what might appear in a textbook. Less work has been done with open-ended, or…

Plants and the outdoors may be something of a mystery to a generation of children who are reportedly spending more and more time indoors; this has the potential to inhibit real understanding of many complex biological processes. Taking children outdoors introduces them to a world from which they are becoming increasingly distant. However, a…

Iron metabolism is an important subject of study for undergraduate students of chemistry and biochemistry. Relevant laboratory exercises are scarce in the literature but would be very helpful in assisting students grasp key concepts. The experiment described here deals with different iron release mechanisms of two protagonists in iron metabolism:…

This article presents recent research results in mental chronometry and neuroimaging that support the coexistence of multiple conceptions. It then presents and elaborates on six possible implications for an adherence to the coexistence claim within the context of scientific conceptual learning: (1) stop the war on misconceptions; (2) use a…

Adding an evolutionary perspective to anatomy teaching can enrich student learning. One way of introducing evolutionary concepts into a course is by "sneaking it in" by presenting interesting and sometimes entertaining "stories" that add anatomical detail, encourage critical thinking, and illustrate underlying evolutionary…

The significant facet of Science Education is to make Science relevant in Students' learning. This involves the ability to draw in examples from daily contexts, to begin with, the learning or to apply concepts learned into familiar everyday phenomena. The main purpose of this study was to find out the relationship between the scientific…

Teachers from Kates Hill Primary School describe uniting the school in a vision for science and raising the profile of science through enrichment by using Explorify.

Numerous initiatives are carried out across the world to support science teaching in early childhood education. However, professional development research shows that in order for teaching interventions to bring about successful changes in practice, it is key that teacher's beliefs, confidence and knowledge change. As a complement to studies…

This paper studies the scaffolding of conceptual development for children aged 4-5 years old during a science project at a Swedish preschool. It specifically examines how bodily knowledge and language are used in interaction, and how conceptual knowledge can be scaffolded with the use of external tools and artefacts. The science project was…