The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (HRD) is a fundamental representation in stellar physics. It contains information about key properties of stars and allows inferences about stellar evolution. The use of the HRD is an important disciplinary activity in astrophysics. For example, it is particularly important to have a graphical understanding of the…

Optics is a core field in the curricula of secondary physics education. In this study, we present the development and validation of a test instrument in the field of optics, the ray optics in converging lenses concept inventory (ROC-CI). It was developed for and validated with middle school students, but can also be adapted for the use in higher…

Smartphone-based experimental exercises were incorporated as part of the homework problems in an introductory mechanics course at a university. A quasi-experimental field study with two cohorts design was performed to measure the impact of such exercises on motivation, interest and conceptual understanding. The empirical results on learning…

The implementation of theatre as a didactic tool for teaching science provides a new perspective on the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in the construction of meaningful learning experiences. Gamification and collaborative work are functional strategies to teach scientific concepts in a creative way. However, there are still conceptual…

Prior findings highlight school students' low motivation to study science, while 21st-century education aims to achieve their key competencies: scientific literacy and autonomous problem-solving to be prepared for smooth adaption to quickly changing circumstances. Real-life learning scenarios can meet these shortfalls to engage the learners by the…

The effect of class size on student learning has numerous policy implications and has been a major subject of conversation and research for decades. Despite this, few studies have been done on class size in the context of university settings or physics courses. This dissertation helps address that gap in the literature by quantitatively analyzing…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person undergraduate chemistry laboratories at North Carolina State University were not available to students during the 2020-2021 academic year and were replaced with online laboratories. With the return to in-person laboratories in the fall semester of 2021, there was widespread concern among the faculty that…

Modern science standards emphasize knowledge-in-use, i.e., connecting scientific practices with content. For knowledge to become usable in knowledge-in-use performances, students need well organized knowledge networks that allow them to activate and connect sets of relevant ideas across contexts, i.e. students need integrated knowledge. We…

This paper is based on qualitative research to understanding of the meaning, benefit and importance of entrepreneurship that develops in the environment of higher education. This research using qualitative research with a naturalistic inquiry approach. This approach was chosen because it was considered more suitable with the characteristics of the…

This research considered students' abilities to read images about dispersed systems, taken from the chemistry textbook. 103 high school students (37 males, 63 females, and 3 unknown) from the school "Svetozar Markovic" in Novi Sad, Republic of Serbia, were included as the research participants. Students' abilities to suggest the titles…

The research mixed method aims to investigate students' creative thinking skills about elasticity in physics. The students' creative thinking skills were measured by diagnostic tests developed by researchers and validated by theoretical physics. The instrument included several indicators of critical thinking skills including fluency, flexibility,…

Supporting teacher candidates' learning of coherent and well-ordered content knowledge is one of the most important educational aims in subject teacher education. To reach this aim, teacher educators need suitable tools to enhance the formation of such knowledge. In this article, we present an analytical framework to examine conceptual knowledge,…

Students commonly develop alternative ideas about topics in science. According to constructivist view of learning, students' alternative conceptions and misconceptions about the process of developing new knowledge should be highlighted. Remedy can be undertaken through conceptual change approach. In order to understand what factors causes 9th…

In this paper we describe the STEAM pedagogy developed under the European Union's Horizon 2020 project iMuSciCA (interactive music science collaborative activities). We present the pedagogical model this interdisciplinary pedagogy is based on and we give a concrete example of lesson scenario in which this pedagogy is applied. In particular we show…

This article describes the development of the Quantization and Probability Representations Inventory (QuPRI) as a measure of student understanding of the electron structure of the atom. The QuPRI was created using a mixed-method sequential design such that the items and distractors were generated on the basis of the analysis of semi-structured…