Various strategies have been promoted to increase student engagement in collaborative activities in chemistry courses, including the use of small portable whiteboards where students can represent and share ideas. In this paper, we summarize the results of a study designed to investigate how the use of small portable whiteboards during groupwork…

Plagiarism is not an issue observed only among students; rather, it also occurs in the publications of researchers in academic journals. The current study explored how Nobel laureates, with the highest possible academic status in the world, engage in text borrowing. A list of 91 laureates in physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, and…

In recent years, chemistry educators are increasingly adopting immersive virtual reality (IVR) technology to help learners visualise molecular interactions. However, educational studies on IVR mostly investigated its usability and user perceptions leaving out its impact on improving conceptual understanding. If they evaluated students' knowledge…

Student science proficiency development demands sustainable and coherent learning environment support. Scholars argue that project-based learning (PBL) is an efficient approach to promoting student science learning, compared to conventional instructions. Yet, few studies have delved into the learning process to explore how a coherent PBL system…

This study aims to evaluate students' ability to process the context information embedded in chemistry problems. To achieve this goal, a diagnostic measurement instrument was developed, comprising 28 short-answer items embedded in seven context-based chemistry tasks. Four hundred and ninety-three ninth-graders took part in the testing in Jiangsu,…

Recent developments in digital technologies, including learning analytics are changing educational practices due to the wealth of information available and its utility to inform academic interventions for students. This study investigates the impact of personalised feedback emails on students' academic performance and student success in large…

Increased sustainable access to undergraduate research opportunities, particularly for historically underrepresented populations, involves transforming departmental and institutional cultures, which is time-consuming and expensive. Competing university interests and tightening budgets necessitate finding effective and affordable ways to implement…

This study investigates students' cognitive resources for identifying symmetry elements using survey data collected from 39 inorganic chemistry students from twelve undergraduate inorganic classes at universities across the United States. We propose a framework that leverages students' knowledge of symmetry elements as a manifold of cognitive…

The way high school chemistry curricula are structured has the potential to convey consequential messages about knowledge and knowing to students and teachers. If a curriculum is built around practicing skills and recalling facts to reach ''correct'' answers, it is unlikely class activities will be seen (by students or the teacher) as…

College science courses pose complex challenges to students. Textbooks are dense and laden with textbook features that may be confusing to students unfamiliar with science texts. Courses are especially challenging because they presuppose a certain degree of disciplinary literacy, or understanding of the knowledge and practices possessed by those…

Question generation is theorized to support comprehension, self-regulation, and achievement, yet the empirical base for whether and how student-generated questions are associated with comprehension monitoring and whether they predict performance remain open questions. To address these, we investigated the questions undergraduate students in an…

Project-based learning (PBL) research is shown to improve students' higher-order thinking skills. In this article, we describe an adaptation of the PBL model that is suitable for colleges with limited science, technology, engineering, and mathematics research capabilities. Our objective was to design a meaningful research project requiring minimal…

The significance of the role of students' interpretation and creation of multiple forms of representation in science learning has long been established and advocated, but there is a paucity of research into the extent to which this emphasis in science education is reflected in high stakes final year high school science examinations. This study…

This study investigated the influence of practical problem-solving tasks (PPST) in promoting meaningful learning (ML) and retention in a nonlaboratory chemistry component of a physical science course for pre-service teachers (PSTs). It utilized a mixed-methods research using a modified quasi-experimental design followed by a detailed analysis of…

Thermodynamics is one of the most complex topics in chemistry. Cognitive Load Theory claims that the complexity of a subject is mainly due to element interactivity - how many elements an individual must organise simultaneously in her/his working memory to master a topic. The simultaneous processing of various chemistry and mathematics concepts to…