Engaging students with primary sources fosters inquiry, critical thinking, and deductive reasoning skills, all of which are vitally important to success in school and beyond. Simply inserting primary sources into the classroom is not enough. This resource uses the best of emerging Internet applications (Web 2.0) to capture the interest of today's…

Analogical reasoning is central to all learning, whether in daily life situations, in the classroom or while doing research. Although analogies can aid the learning process of making sense of phenomena and understanding new ideas in terms of known ideas, these should be used with care. This article reports a study of the use of analogies and the…

E-learning projects and related research generate an increasing amount of evidence within and across various disciplines and contexts. The field is very heterogeneous as e-learning approaches are often characterized by rather unique combinations of situational factors that guide the design and realization of e-learning in a bottom-up fashion.…

We propose that map reading can be construed as a form of analogical mapping. We tested 2 predictions that follow from this claim: First, young children's patterns of performance in map reading tasks should parallel those found in analogical mapping tasks; and, second, children will benefit from guided alignment instructions that help them see the…

This article presents an analogy to illustrate the effect of surface roughness on surface wettability. I used a water-filled balloon to represent water droplet, a toothpick to represent surface roughness and Styrofoam as the surface. The analogies presented in this article will help visualize how roughness affects the wettability of the surface…

The present article contains a reanalysis of data resulting from a research project carried out on a group of five preschool-aged children. The data were collected from a class of 16 children participating in a pre/post research design that focused on the shadow formation phenomenon. The findings of the previous research project, based on a speech…

We describe the development and validation of the Quantitative Assessment of Socio-scientific Reasoning (QuASSR) in a college context. The QuASSR contains 10 polytomous, two-tiered items crossed between two scenarios, and is based on theory suggesting a four-pronged structure for SSR (complexity, perspective taking, inquiry, and skepticism). In…

This review article identifies the conceptual underpinnings of current movement research in physical education. Using a hermeneutic approach, four analogies for movement education are identified: the "motor program analogy", the "neurobiological systems analogy", the "instinctive movement analogy", and the…

Poetic structures emerge in spoken language when speakers repeat grammatical phrases that were spoken before. They create the potential to amend or comment on previous speech, and to convey meaning through the structure of discourse. This paper considers the ways in which poetic structure analysis contributes to two perspectives on emergent…

The challenge in serious games is to improve the effectiveness of learning by stimulating relevant cognitive processes. In this paper, we investigate the potential of surprise in two experiments with prevocational students in the domain of proportional reasoning. Surprise involves an emotional reaction, but it also serves a cognitive goal as it…

An important goal of history education is to promote the student's ability to perform historical perspective taking (HPT). HPT refers to the ability to understand how people in the past viewed their world at various times and in various places to explain why they did what they did. In this study, we assessed a sample of 15- and 16-year-old…

This article attempts to connect the material world of the science classroom, expressed in inscriptions, speech, and corporeal forms, and the world of meaning. Imaginative thinking is the key mechanism that will bridge the gap between the 2 worlds. Various types of texts can be used as narrative vehicles for scientific concepts. This article…

Taking the premise that construction or meaning making largely depends on the existing knowledge and experience, this paper uses an analogy of learning the culinary art and learning to teach. This paper attempts to clarify the characteristics of signature pedagogy of teacher education focusing on the threshold concept of constructivism by using…

Students try to understand many abstract concepts by using mental models they have created by thinking and imagining. Students must have a functional and dynamic atomic model in their minds in order to understand the atomic and atomic concepts. In this study; it was aimed to determine the models of science student candidates using the analogy of…

This dissertation describes the results of an investigation into introductory student understanding of special relativity in the context of the relativity of simultaneity. The research probes the extent to which students are able to use concepts from both Galilean and special relativity to determine, for multiple reference frames, the time…