This paper emphasizes the possibilities and effects of using research approach (discovering scientific concepts through play) as one of the innovative ways of teaching pre-school children. Apart from the fundamental characteristics and importance of using research approach, the paper also presents the results of an empirical research aimed at the…

Two foundational concepts in biology education are 1) offspring are not identical to their parents, and 2) organisms undergo changes throughout their lives. These concepts are included in both international and U.S. curricular standards. Research in psychology has shown that children often have difficulty understanding these concepts, as they are…

An android application named SmartChem was developed to explain multiple representations of acid-base chemistry. This paper is a description of an android-based media (SmartChem) through the stages of design, development, validation and revision, and finally, limited trials with pre-service science teachers. SmartChem is intended to aid students…

Teaching cosmology at the undergraduate or high school level requires simplifications and analogies, and inevitably brings the teacher into contact with at least one of the pedagogical interpretations of the expanding Universe. The by far most popular interpretation holds that galaxies in an expanding Universe are stationary, while space itself…

Though several conceptual inventories have been developed for thermal physics, none target upper-division material and all focus specifically on thermodynamics without including statistical mechanics content. In this paper, we outline the development process of an upper-division thermal physics assessment that captures both thermodynamics and…

This article describes an investigation into teaching and learning with student-generated animations combined with a representational pedagogy. In particular, it reports on interactive discussions that were stimulated by the students' own animations as well as their critiques of experts' animations. Animations representing views of states of…

Since the release of "A Framework for K-12 Science Education" in 2012, there has been a significant shift toward the use of science and engineering practices that mirror the way scientists do their work (NRC 2012). The "Framework" states, "A focus on practices (in the plural) avoids the mistaken impression that there is…

Mass spectrometers are ever-increasingly powerful, user-friendly, and affordable. Thus, the addition of mass spectrometry experiments into the undergraduate laboratory curriculum is now both feasible and an effective tool to introduce students to relevant instrumentation. Here an experiment demonstrating the use of a high-resolution electrospray…

UC Merced's upper-division analytical chemistry course has been modified to include a series of Jupyter notebooks intended to introduce chemistry students to the Python computer language. These Jupyter notebooks were designed to cover a wide variety of topics common to quantitative and instrumental analysis. Assuming no prior programming…

In a normal year approximately 3 months pass between students taking their final examinations in high school or college and beginning an undergraduate course in chemistry. In the months prior to those examinations, students will usually have undertaken an extensive period of revision and consolidation of the key concepts learned throughout their…

The Boltzmann distribution lies at the heart of essentially all of statistical thermodynamics. In most textbooks, this distribution is introduced either "ad hoc" or it is mathematically derived by constrained entropy optimization using the method of Lagrange multipliers. Unfortunately, when students enroll in a statistical thermodynamics…

In this work we present the application of design based research (DBR) methodology to conduct a systematic iterative study of the design and implementation of a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) on emf (electromotive force). This work is the final part of a broader study that started with the analysis of students' difficulties with emf in the…

The present work explores students' repertoire of explicit knowledge fragments relevant to the atomic structure, seeking to answer which of those and through which routes are activated by students when constructing their explanations for some everyday situations. For this purpose, six tasks describing different situations were given to 225…

Senior secondary students were tasked with generating slowmation representations of biological processes they had already learned about during Year 11 VCE biology. The slowmation task therefore connects work with representations to review of course material. Results indicate that students negotiated between the textbook (and some teacher-specific…

This paper links early foundations in science for young children to the eventual achievement of science literacy for adults. There are five key arguments being made: (i) the early-years foundation stage (EYFS) specialists need to have a view for exactly what foundations "are" being laid in classrooms; (ii) that they all need to be --…