The results of an earlier empirical research study on modifying 'step-by-step' instructions to practical activities requiring one or more steps of the experiments to be designed by students initiated a longitudinal study to investigate the effectiveness of the approach for younger students and over a period of time. The longitudinal study that…

Chemists refer to chemical phenomena on different representational levels--macroscopic, symbolic, and submicroscopic--which are directly related and connected to each other. Especially in the laboratory, students have to reason about various mechanistic features at the submicroscopic level and connect them in a meaningful way to make sense of the…

In the field of science education, laboratory learning environment has gained renewed interest in the recent decade. This study aimed to investigate the relationships among students' conceptions of science laboratory learning, perceptions of the science laboratory learning environment, and their academic self-efficacy in science learning by…

STEM is an educational practice to integrate science, mathematics, engineering, and technology within the formal and informal context and it provides practical opportunities for the child to make sense of the world holistically. Moreover, the most important benefit of STEM activities for children, including engineering design, is to improve or…

Biology learning, especially the topic of plant physiology, requires Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). This ability needs to be improved with HOTS based teaching materials. The teaching materials, however, have not been developed, especially those in plant physiology topic. Students' HOTS in biology learning still requires an improvement as…

Practical classes are an important and essential part of undergraduate programs in Chemical Engineering, as each experiment provides an opportunity to reinforce the theory of discrete unit operations that are taught elsewhere in the course. While an expensive pedagogical method, when practical sessions are delivered well, they can be one of the…

This study aims to determine the effects of activities based on the Prediction-Observation-Explanation [POE] strategy on sixth grade students' understanding of the particulate nature of matter. The study was carried out with a sixth grade group consisting of 41 students from a middle school in an eastern city. Three activities were carried out…

Building on Carey and Smith's work on epistemology of science, this study characterized elementary students' scientific epistemology from the role-of-idea and theory-building perspective. The participants included 102 elementary students in Hong Kong. Open-ended questions and coding schemes were developed to examine and characterize their…

Attaining the vision for science teaching and learning emphasized in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the next generation science standards (NGSS) will require major shifts in teaching practices in many science classrooms. As NGSS-inspired cognitively demanding tasks begin to appear in more and more science classrooms, facilitating…

Not understanding is central to scientific work: what scientists do is learn about the natural world, which involves seeking out what they do not know. In classrooms, however, the position of not-understanding is generally a liability; confusion is an unfortunate condition to resolve as quickly as possible, or to conceal. In this article, we argue…

This study examines the classroom talk about models and modelling of two secondary science teachers implementing a model-based inquiry instructional unit. The goal was to better understand the opportunities for explicit metamodeling talk in the science classroom. The findings revealed the ways in which they used language to frame the modelling…

International assessments have revealed that students in numerous nations lack scientific reasoning skills. Science teachers who support students' scientific skill development through the use of authentic practices provide students with tools needed for success in future science courses. Teachers training focused on pedagogy that supports student…

Shot noise is one of the essential concepts in instrumental analysis, which places a fundamental limit on quantitative measurements when the magnitude of the analytical signal is very small. The introduction of an abstract scientific concept with a brief historical perspective often shows the human side of science. In the scientific literature,…

In science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education there has been increased emphasis on teaching goals that include not only the learning of content knowledge but also the development of scientific reasoning skills. The Lawson classroom test of scientific reasoning (LCTSR) is a popular assessment instrument for scientific reasoning.…

Aqueous biphasic systems (ABS) composed of polypropylene glycol and carbohydrates, two benign substances are proposed to separate two food colorants (E122 and E133). ABS are promising extractive platforms, particularly for biomolecules, due to their aqueous and mild nature (pH and temperature), reduced environmental impact and processing costs.…