Teenage magazine content, after decades, continues to complicate decision making in the communication of the young, impressionable girls who read them. Previous research has indicated that teenagers can be negatively influenced by the media, including teen magazines (e.g., Redcross, 2003; Milkie, 2002; Durham, 2008; Lamb & Brown, 2006). These…

To support and improve effective science teaching, educators need methods to reveal student understandings and misconceptions of science concepts and to offer all students an opportunity to reflect on their own knowledge construction and organization. Students can benefit by engaging in scientific activities in which they build personal…

This dissertation shows the evolution of five undergraduate students' ideas of natural and anthropogenic climate change throughout a lecture hall course on climate change. This research was informed by conceptual change theory and students' inaccurate ideas of climate change. Subjects represented different levels of climate change understanding at…

The study explored the efficacy of four-step (4-E) learning cycle approach on students understanding of concepts related to Simple Harmonic Motion (SHM). 124 students (63 for experimental group and 61 for control group) participated in the study. The students' views and ideas in simple Harmonic Achievement test were analyzed qualitatively. The…

Knowledge, power and democracy are being more explicitly related to higher education globally. Increasingly there are calls for cognitive justice and the development of a sociology of absences, particularly in relation to structures of inequalities and knowledge production from the Global South. The university of the future will need to be…

"Chalk and talk" had been the staple pedagogical approach of my Science teaching practice since entering the profession. I felt that there was a great deal of information that I must impart to my students. My tried and tested way to deliver information to my students had always been simply to stand in front of them and tell it to them... So what…

Ability and achievement are not traits: they are relations. Mistaking traits for relations has a history even in science (our understanding of gravity). This mistake is possibly responsible for the lackluster performance of the results of our educational research when we have tried to use it to inform policy. It is particularly troublesome for…

This is our fourth paper in our five paper series describing our national study of general education astronomy students' conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. While previous papers in this series focused on the processes by which we collected and quantitatively analyzed our data, this paper presents the most common pre-instruction…

Twenty-four free-response questions were developed to explore introductory college astronomy students' understanding of gravity in a variety of contexts, including in and around Earth, throughout the solar system, and in hypothetical situations. Questions were separated into three questionnaires, each of which was given to a section of…

This research investigates the effect of classroom explicitation of initial conceptions (CEIC) on conceptual change in the context of learning electricity. Eight hundred and seventy five thirteen year-olds were tested in laboratory conditions to see if CEIC is or is not a productive step toward conceptual change. All students experienced a…

Provoking police officers to kill oneself or "suicide by cop" (SBC) has received scholarly as well as public attention. The extent to which film representations of SBC reflect SBC in society in relation to danger, depression, and other features was assessed in this study. Data on cinematic portrayals of SBC are from 16 American films;…

Both gifted educators and parents need to be vigilant as to how gifted education is characterized in the popular media. Gifted educators spend countless resources to meet the needs of gifted students using very limited fiscal resources, and it is imperative that those efforts are not undermined in the popular media by unsubstantiated statements.…

Medical myth-busting is a common health education strategy during which a health educator highlights common misconceptions about health and then presents evidence to refute those misconceptions. Whereas this strategy can be an effective way to correct faulty health beliefs held by young adults, research from the field of cognitive psychology…

This study examined the implementation of a scripted phonics program taught by paraprofessionals in kindergarten classrooms in a local school district. Two research questions were investigated: (a) Can paraprofessionals with no prior training in phonics effectively implement a scripted phonics program for struggling kindergartners? and (b) Did…

This study explores middle and high school students' understanding of the particulate nature of matter after they were taught the concept. A total of 87 students (41 high school and 46 middle school) participated in the study. Findings suggest that students held misconceptions about the law of conservation of matter, chemical composition of matter…