We present a study on teacher education and, in particular, on Physics. Our assumption is that General Didactics and Disciplinary Didactic constitute two fundamental components of teachers' professional development and therefore both must be used to interpret didactic phenomena adequately. This research involves a sample of 274 prospective…

Recent conceptualizations of science literacy, a key aim of contemporary science education, suggest defining it as a function of actual uses of science in daily life. We characterize expressions of science literacy in online authentic public discourse, using content analysis of a year's worth of widely-read Israeli online news site coverage of…

We investigated the effects of just-in-time guidance at various stages of inquiry learning by novice learners. Thirteen participants, randomly assigned to an intervention (n = 8) or control (n = 5) group, were observed as they learned about DC electric circuits using a web-based simulation. Just-in-time instructional prompts to observe, predict,…

This article describes the educational and public engagement outcomes of an activity called the "ChemClout Challenge" that was implemented in a general chemistry course at UC Riverside. Students worked in groups to make chemistry-themed videos, posted them to social media platforms, then voted on their favorite videos. The majority of…

Many research results show that students often highlight "mixed-type" reasoning when tackling problematic situations and problems. This reasoning is based on the simultaneous use of common-sense and mere descriptions of facts, perceived as sufficient to build an "explanation" of observed or proposed situations and problems.…

For many students biochemistry is a demanding course because they are expected to apply previously learned foundational concepts to new biological contexts. These foundational concepts serve as a scaffold onto which to build threshold concepts such as the physical basis of interactions. Unfortunately, many students possess misconceptions or gaps…

This study aims to determine the topic-specific nature of two experienced chemistry teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in the topics of interactions between chemical species and states of matter. The teachers' PCK on these topics was investigated in terms of the following components: orientations toward science teaching (OST), knowledge…

Recent research about the learning of science has suggested that misconceptions are not replaced by scientific conceptions and extinguished once conceptual change has occurred. Rather, misconceptions still exist alongside the acquired scientific conceptions and must be suppressed in order to use scientific conceptions. Our goal in this review is…

Cell biology is widely considered to be the most important subject for promoting current modern biology. This paper sheds new light on the subject with the development of a diagnostic test to investigate misconceptions among pre-service biology teachers in cell biology. In this study, we developed and validated a diagnostic test -- known as the…

The aim of this study was to investigate the levels of secondary school students' knowledge about three Global Environmental Problems: Global Warming, Acid Rain, and Ozone Layer Depletion. 638 7th grade (N=316) and 8th grade (N=322) students enrolled in five different secondary schools participated in this study. The survey method was used to…

The periodic table is an essential topic in the teaching and learning of science at all education levels, as it contains information about the main physical and chemical properties of the different elements constituting the matter. However, becoming familiar with the facts behind the periodic table such as the element names and/or symbols, their…

This study examines future secondary physics teachers' knowledge related to the teaching of sound waves, and specifically the topics of sound level and sound intensity. The data is comprised of future teachers' responses to a task in which they had to compose a script for an imaginary dialogue between a teacher and a group of students and to…

An important step in learning to use math in science is learning to see symbolic equations not just as calculational tools, but as ways of expressing fundamental relationships among physical quantities, of coding conceptual information, and of organizing physics knowledge structures. In this paper, I propose "anchor equations" as a…

In recent years, the science education research community has become increasingly interested in the learning domain of Einsteinian physics (EP). While the literature has provided accounts of how EP education can impact secondary and undergraduate students' attitudes and engagement with physics, we still lack such research with younger students.…

This study examines the drawings that 178 young children carried out on two different occasions separated by a period of one year to explain their understanding of the plant world. The pictorial content of the drawings was analysed in accordance to the categories that previous research has proved to be useful when it comes to gaining an insight…