A new Pew Research Center survey finds that many Americans can answer at least some questions about science concepts -- most can correctly answer a question about antibiotics overuse or the definition of an "incubation period," for example. But other concepts are more challenging; fewer Americans can recognize a hypothesis or identify…

The most recent science education reform, the Next Generation Science Standards (NRC, 2012) set forth a new and ambitious agenda for science education. These standards go beyond all of the previous versions and combine three dimensions: disciplinary core ideas, science practices and crosscutting concepts. They call on teachers to recognizing and…

The study reported in this paper contributes to the exploration of the development of children's mathematical drawing. 36 preschool children produced drawings of 'something tall and something short'. Open-ended analysis of the forms and structures of the drawings revealed four categories ranging from scribble to the base-line comparison of two…

Metamodeling ideas move beyond using a model to solve a problem to consider the nature and purpose of a model, such as reasoning about a model's empirical basis and understanding why and how a model might change or be replaced. Given that chemistry relies heavily on the use of models to describe particulate-level phenomena, developing…

Studies indicate that the failure of science education to meet the needs of the 21st century is to some extent due to the inability to incorporate scientific reasoning and higher order assessments in the school instruction. Though the outcomes of education seek higher-order thinking abilities there is a lack of high ability assessments in…

Conceptually understanding chemistry requires the ability to transition among representational levels to use an understanding of submicroscopic entities and properties to explain macroscopic phenomena. Past literature describes student struggles with these transitions but provides limited information about upper-level post-secondary chemistry…

Children start to gain concepts from an early age. They are particularly sensitive to what is happening in their close surroundings. As a result of their daily observations, they can create various conceptual information about the Earth, Sun, and Moon. It is thought that the participation of children in the education process is very important for…

The purpose of this study was to describe the effect of multiple knowledge representations of physical and chemical changes on the development of primary pre-service teachers' cognitive structures. The study took place in an introductory general chemistry laboratory course in a four-year teacher education program. Multiple knowledge…

Constructing scientific arguments is an important practice for students because it helps them to make sense of data using scientific knowledge and within the conceptual and experimental boundaries of an investigation. In this study, we used a text mining method called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify underlying patterns in students…

This research was carried out to investigate the effect of the 5E learning method and 5E method enriched with REACT strategy on student achievement in science education. The research was carried out with 64 first-year students (30 in the experimental groups, 34 in the control groups) in the Department of Primary Education at a state university in…

The use of symmetry is widespread in chemistry, as it is used for predictions of the number of allowed and forbidden absorptions in electronic, vibrational, and rotational spectroscopies; for predictions of the combination of atomic orbitals to produce molecular orbitals; and in many other chemical applications. One critical step in these…

Reorienting organic chemistry laboratories with an emphasis on systemic thinking can only be beneficial to students. Addressing the challenges of climate change and the development of renewable resources with a fundamental reaction, such as the hydrogenation of an alkene, will allow students to see organic chemistry as a science beneficial to…

Science educators have developed a variety of assessment techniques to help students connect their scientific knowledge and bridge conceptual gaps. In chemistry, concept maps and creative exercises are the two notable assessments that have been implemented into multiple chemistry courses and indicated promising effects on students' conceptual…

In the process of problem solving, intuitive thinking leads to findings that go beyond gaps and plays a decisive role in problem solving. Considering that problems often need to be solved in groups rather than by individuals, it is necessary to examine how intuitive thinking expressed by individuals is shared and elaborated among peers in a group…

The affective domain and its impact on science achievement has been studied with increasing attention over the past decade. However, there has been little empirical work on how individual interest, and facilitation of situational interest in the classroom, facilitates learning of concepts within fine-grained units of instruction. Drawing upon…