Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) facilitate competency-based assessments. India is on the verge of implementing competency-based training for postgraduate programs. MD degree in Biochemistry is a unique program available exclusively in India. Postgraduate programs in most specialties have started working toward EPA-based curriculum, in…

In the context of England, secondary biology education is dominated by sub-organismal systems, such as physiology, often to the detriment of evolution & ecology and impeding an integrated understanding of biology. This paper proposes a framework that teachers could use to help them consider how the learning of physiological and developmental…

Thermodynamic processes are often presented in so called P-V diagrams and the processes are often isobaric, isochoric, isothermal, and adiabatic. The purpose of the qualitative research reported here was to explore students' reasoning and interpretation of P-V diagrams that were presented by the help of GeoGebra. The research group had 15 students…

The past century has seen a debate on what characterises a scientifically literate citizen. Originally, scientific literacy implied that a citizen should know the products of science but has grown to incorporate processes of science and aspects of the nature of science. Studies on students' epistemic knowledge are rarer than ones on students'…

Recent studies in applied linguistics research have focused on how teachers draw on 'outside' knowledge relating to students' everyday life for the purpose of teaching subject matter content. This study focuses on such practices in the context of English-medium instruction (EMI) higher education in an online undergraduate chemistry module.…

Understanding genetics, an important topic in the study of biology, is critical for scientific literacy in agriculture, health, and forensic investigations. However, it has been observed that teachers find genetics difficult to teach and pupils do not perform well in it. Teachers can use expository teaching or active learning methods, but the…

This study examined how filters and amplifiers affect pre-service science teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in a human and environment unit. The redefined consensus model for PCK and decision-making framework for identifying how personal and extrapersonal factors act as filters and amplifiers were selected as theoretical frameworks.…

Physics homework often boils down to solving end-of-chapter quantitative problems. For targeting different learning goals of physics education, different types of homework are needed. The aim of this research was to compare the effectiveness of simulation-based, video-based, and paper-and-pencil homework in developing an understanding about…

Being able to move between different representations levels (macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic) is important to understand a chemical phenomenon meaningfully. The current study investigated how pre-service science teachers moved from symbolic representation to sub-microscopic representation. A total of 205 pre-service science teachers,…

In light of recent efforts to increase the diversity of the physics workforce, the need to counter the long-term marginalisation of students of colour from physics has received more attention. Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) is a multicultural approach to teaching and learning designed to attend to students' culture as starting points toward…

This study investigated Chemistry students' performance and retention (knowledge and understanding, knowledge and application, perception and attitude) in Organic Chemistry in three Senior High Schools (SHSs) within Tamale Metropolis in Ghana. Collaborative learning models were employed as intervention strategies. Quasi-experimental design was…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] In this paper, we describe the results of a research project whose goals were to (1) develop and implement video-based experimental investigations using the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) approach and (2) study how…

The increasing and diversifying student enrollments in introductory physics courses make reliable, valid, and usable instruments for measuring student skills and gains ever more important. In introductory physics, in addition to teaching facts about mechanics, we also seek to teach our students the skills of "thinking like a physicist,"…

Mass balance (MB) reasoning offers a rich topic for examination of students' scientific thinking and skills, as it requires students to account for multiple inputs and outputs within a system and apply covariational reasoning. Using previously validated constructed response prompts for MB, we examined 1,920 student-constructed responses (CRs)…

Science advances through the interplay of idea construction and idea critique. Our goal was to describe varied forms of productive disciplinary engagement that emerged during primary literature discussions. Such descriptions are necessary for biology educators and researchers to design for and recognize diverse repertoires of participation in the…