Suggests activities to elicit and develop children's conceptual understanding of plants. (Author)

Describes an investigation of first-year chemical engineering students' understanding of the mole concept. Finds that a series of activities designed to provide students with visual or experiential points of reference for the mole concept had a strong positive effect on student misconceptions. Contains 16 references. (Author/WRM)

Reports on the findings of a research project involving decimals and students' misconceptions about them. Offers some practical activities that may help children understand decimals better. (ASK)

Explores misconceptions that students hold about sampling techniques on surveys. Highlights students' thinking and instructional implications from two studies that examined upper-elementary students' written and oral explanations as they responded to survey situations. (ASK)

Investigates students' understandings and misconceptions of specific concepts in chemistry by using the quantum model of atoms and molecules. (Contains 20 references.) (YDS)

Examination of senior secondary and tertiary level chemistry students' descriptions of their mental models for chemical bonding revealed prevalent alternative conceptions. Some 20 alternative conceptions were revealed, the most common being belief that continuous ionic or metallic lattices were molecular in nature, and confusion over ionic size…

The ideas of Year I undergraduate biology students about the consequences, causes, and cures of the 'greenhouse effect' was determined using a closed-form questionnaire, and results were compared with a parallel study undertaken nearly 10 years ago. Many of the students in the present survey were unaware of the potential effect of global warming…

Presents a study investigating the effects of peer-assisted learning in upper grade elementary students. Discusses the benefits of this activity for students and teachers. (YDS)

Assessing students' knowledge is complex. Ideally, an assessment measures what students know about a given construct. Too often, however, assessments are complicated by miscommunication. Miscommunication occurs when students misinterpret the intent of the teacher's question and/or the teacher misinterprets the students' answers. This article…

Multiple choice questions are a common method of assessing student understanding. In this article, the authors discuss and evaluate a student-focused collaborative learning strategy for working with such questions that results in greater student learning and allows instructors to better understand student thinking and ultimately to write better…

Using evidence from eye-tracking studies, Van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, and Liversedge (2005) have argued against currently implemented constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution. The case against these competition models is based on a mismatch between reported patterns of reading data and the putative predictions of the models.…

Although researchers are exploring animals' capacity for monitoring their states of uncertainty, the use of some paradigms allows the criticism that animals map avoidance responses to error-causing stimuli not because of uncertainty monitored but because of feedback signals and stimulus aversion. The authors addressed this criticism with an…

Verleger, Jaskowski, Aydemir, van der Lubbe, and Groen (see record 2004-21166-002) and Lleras and Enns (see record 2004-21166-001) have argued that negative compatibility effects (NCEs) obtained with masked primes do not reflect self-inhibition processes in motor control. Instead, NCEs are assumed to reflect activation of the response opposite to…

"In his commentary to our paper on the use of knowledge, skill, and ability statements in developing credentialing examinations (Wang, Schnipke, & Witt, 2005 )," Dr. LaDuca set forth his concerns while commending our paper for providing helpful insights into the importance of careful delineation of KSAs. We believe that there is little substantive…

Climate change is one of the most serious global environmental problems and for that reason there has been lately a great interest in educating pupils, the future citizens, about it. Previous research has shown that pupils of all ages and teachers hold many misconceptions and misunderstandings concerning this issue. This paper reports on research…