Recent biological research (Trewavas, 2003; Mancuso & Viola, 2013; Gagliano, 2018) has (re)demonstrated the variety and complexity of the adaptive behaviour of plants. In parallel with these findings, and in acknowledgement of the important role played by plants in the biosphere and climate of the planet, the representation of plants in…

In response to an invitation to integrate science and art pedagogy, science and dance students enrolled in specific disciplinary courses, collaboratively produced choreography based on scientific principles. This paper reports students' experience of this process. Science students reported an increased understanding of concepts, while dance…

This article presents the integration of Tinkercad, a free online modeling program that allows students to model molecular genetic concepts, into the distance learning process. The students had the opportunity to learn molecular genetics in a fun and more efficient way in spite of the limitations of the COVID-19 lockdown, and, in this respect, it…

Even though genetics has been implemented in biology curricula at secondary schools for decades, reports repeatedly indicate that students still hold various misconceptions about this topic. To successfully target these misconceptions, we need to know their nature and origin. We aimed to investigate these properties in the Czech educational system…

This article introduces a network approach to describe the quality of written scientific explanations. Existing approaches evaluate explanations mainly on the level of sentences or as a whole but not on the elementary level of single terms. Moreover, evaluation of explanations is often based on highly inferential scoring techniques. We addressed…

Among the relevant aspects of the family resemblance approach (FRA), our study focuses on the potential of the approach to elaborate on disciplinary identities in an interdisciplinary context, specifically regarding the interplay between physics and mathematics. We present and discuss how the FRA wheel can be used and intertwined with the…

Electrostatic force is the preliminary and fundamental topic that forms the bedrock on which the conceptual framework of "electromagnetism" is built. Being a 'vector' quantity, electromagnetic force naturally inherits direction as well as magnitude. The conceptualization of such physical quantities may pose a challenge. The present work…

Recent articles have introduced ideas from Physics, specifically, negentropy, to the social sciences. Applications have been primarily in higher education, online learning, and organizations. This article applies negentropy to PK-12 school contexts, discussing the principles for application of systemic school reform and improvement. Negentropy is…

Here, a relatively simple laboratory experiment of a physical pendulum, suitable for students of science and engineering in the first courses of university physics, is presented to illustrate its dynamic behavior and to determine its inertia moment. To this end, a long wooden rod of length L = 99.8 cm and cross-section radius R = 1.73 cm was used…

Issues regarding scientific explanation have been of interest to philosophers from Pre-Socratic times. The notion of scientific explanation is of interest not only to philosophers, but also to science educators as is clearly evident in the emphasis given to K-12 students' construction of explanations in current national science education reform…

In teaching, students' representations could constitute an obstacle to the construction of scientific knowledge and are often considered stable cognitive structures whose organization is sought to be inferred through questionnaires and interviews. This study aims at identifying and analyzing high school students' representations related to the…

Climate change is a major environmental challenge society is facing. While young children will experience the impacts of climate change for longer, research into their perceptions of climate change is scant. To address this gap, this qualitative case study presents the perceptions of climate change of 10 young Maltese children (4-7 years). Data…

The Brønsted-Lowry acid-base model is fundamental when discussing acid and base strength in organic chemistry as many of the reactions include a competing proton transfer reaction. This model requires evaluating chemical stability "via" a consideration of electronic granularity. The purpose of this study is to identify students' mental…

We examined the structure of domain-specific academic science vocabulary, general academic vocabulary, and conceptual science knowledge and their impact on each other across two measurement points in a sample of 388 German third graders. Results show that the three constructs can be empirically differentiated. The high latent correlation between…

While elimination reactions are ubiquitous in organic chemistry textbooks, their implementation in undergraduate laboratories still suffers from a lack of reliable and easy setup procedures. This paper describes an easy-to-implement set of elimination experiments in the pentanol and bromopentane series using a modified Hickman distillation head.…