We investigate student confusion of concepts of electric and magnetic force. At various times during a traditional university-level course, we administered a series of simple questions about the direction of force on a charged particle moving through either an electric or a magnetic field. We find that after electric force instruction but before…

This study investigated the conceptual understanding of measures of spread among community college students in an introductory statistics course. The course is centered around deemphasizing computational skills and focused, rather, on development of conceptual understanding. Open-ended questions were developed to explore and assess students'…

This paper explores misconceptions of the number line which are revealed when pre-service primary teachers locate negative decimals on a number line. Written test responses from 94 pre-service primary teachers provide an initial data source which is supplemented by group responses to worksheets completed during a lesson and individual interviews.…

A number of studies have demonstrated schema-related misinformation effects in typical individuals, but no research to date has examined this with witnesses with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), despite their impaired ability to generate core elements that define everyday events. After witnessing slides depicting a bank robbery, 16 adults with ASD…

The purpose of this study was to identify prospective primary school teachers' misconceptions about the states of matter. The sample of the study was 227 fourth-year prospective primary school teachers in a Department of Primary Education in Turkey. Researcher asked from every participant to write a response to an open ended question about…

Climate literacy is an essential component of a strategy to comprehend and confront the grand challenge of global climate change. However, scientific complexity, societal implications, and political associations make climate change a difficult but important topic to teach. In this paper we report on the results of a survey of undergraduate faculty…

All three of us, the authors, are white and do not speak Ebonics, (or African American Language, AAL). How the misperceptions of AAL impact our students inspired our interest in the subject. The title of this piece refers to the ubiquity of AAL, historically, culturally, as an influential cultural wellspring. Although AAL continues to influence…

Inspection of thousands of student responses to computer-marked assessment questions has brought insight into the errors made by adult distance learners of science. Most of the questions analysed were in summative use and required students to construct their own response. Both of these things increased confidence in the reliability of the…

We investigate how students connect explanations and arguments from evidence about plant growth and metabolism--two key practices described by the "Next Generation Science Standards". This study reports analyses of interviews with 22 middle and high school students postinstruction, focusing on how their sense-making strategies led them…

In the present set of experiments, we systematically examined the processes that occur while reading texts designed to refute and explain commonsense beliefs that reside in readers' long-term memory. In Experiment 1 (n = 36), providing readers with a refutation-plus-explanation of a commonsense belief was sufficient to significantly reduce…

In the early 1800s, the U.S. President Thomas Jefferson assembled a team of explorers led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to forge a waterway connecting the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. How has this environment changed in 200 years and how do elementary students make sense of those changes? This study looks at the impact of…

Teachers who are not considered to be culturally competent may misinterpret many characteristics exhibited by African American students. They may be unaware of the African American linguistic practices and characteristics and they may also be unfamiliar with research conducted by scholars such as Zora Neale Hurston and A. Wade Boykin. This lack of…

This paper explores the effectiveness of using "structured examples in concert with prompting reflective questions" to address misconceptions held by mechanical engineering students about thermodynamic principles by employing pre-test and post-test design, a structured questionnaire, lecture room observation, and participants'…

This article defines the term "under matching" as the behavior in which mostly less-affluent, highly qualified high school graduates choose not to enroll at an institution that matches their qualifications--behavior which threatens their chances of earning a degree. The supporting research--rigorous, compelling, and…

Being a class room teacher in rural areas for more than two decade's author has observed that rural area learners are suffering from multi faced learning barriers. Conceptual understanding and reasoning capacity is very poor and they are performing poorly in their school based examinations. Aim of this paper is to present a suitable, cost…