There is an infinity of realized and potential creative things, creative ideas, and creative performances, and yet there is no such thing as creativity, at least not in the two ways most of us think about creativity. (1) There is no general essence of creativity, no indispensable factor or shared quality that is an intrinsic part of all creative…

National reform documents all around the world issue an urgent need for the development of integrated STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) curricula. With the emphasis on the development of STEM curricula, there is also a need for improving teachers' and future teachers' conceptions of the integrated STEM approach. This study…

Within the Threshold Concepts Framework, 'postliminal variation' has been defined as the variation in the point and state of exit into a new conceptual space, and the epistemological and ontological terrain encountered from that point onwards. However, in the extensive published literature on threshold concepts, we find many cases in which its…

Contextual features of assessments can influence the ideas students draw from and the ways they assemble knowledge. We used a mixed-methods approach to explore how surface-level item context impacts student reasoning. In study 1, we developed an isomorphic survey to capture student reasoning about fluid dynamics, a crosscutting phenomenon, in two…

This research project's initial purpose was to explore how Black youth who had been assigned to youth detention centers described their experiences with school-based racism, and how those experiences informed their experiences with school discipline prior to being detained in a correctional facility. Guided by the following research questions, (1)…

Teacher education programs need to prepare their preservice teachers to both implement current science education reforms and teach in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. In this qualitative study, we used a framework of four instructional principles to investigate 31 preservice secondary science teachers' understanding of instruction…

Big ideas, sometimes referred to as key, core, fundamental or threshold concepts, are widely applicable concepts at the heart of disciplines that are or have been central and influential for their fields. Attention here is particularly directed to meta-concepts common to sister disciplines in the sciences. "Learning thresholds",…

In this study, it is aimed to determine the maltreatment behaviors of parents and the emotional outputs of these behaviors. The study is a qualitative research in the phenomenology pattern. In the research, extreme and deviant sampling, one of the purposive sampling methods, was used to determine the participants. The participants of the study are…

The purposes of this study were to determine metaphoric perception of preservice teachers from different fields regarding technological change and to examine the differences and similarities between perceptions of preservice teachers (1st and 4th grades). This study employed single case (holistic) study as a qualitative approach. Participants…

To prepare students to integrate diverse perspectives, colleges nationwide offer a wide range of interdisciplinary learning experiences. Within this educational context, students often need more than exposure to multiple perspectives in order to integrate ideas across disciplines. They benefit from instruction that scaffolds their efforts to…

The threshold concepts framework provides educators with a useful way of thinking about the struggles students have in coming to know essential, hard to grasp knowledge. A threshold concept is often best understood through reference to eight characteristics that together describe what is critical to effective knowledge acquisition. This conceptual…

Political Information Literacy (PIL) is a vital and essential set of skills pre-dominantly discussed in Library and Information Studies disciplines. PIL is necessary to navigate the convoluted political information landscape, including the threats to democracy and the spreading of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news. Having PIL is…

This is a response to two discussions of my article 'The Weakness of "Powerful Knowledge"' featuring in 2018 in the "London Review of Education" 16 (2), the first by Johan Muller and Michael Young and the second by Jim Hordern. It also makes brief comments on pieces on powerful knowledge in the "London Review of…

In this article, we report findings of students' conceptions of values and impartiality in political science teaching in relation to research on epistemic beliefs. This field of research concerns students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge in different disciplines; beliefs that are central to learning disciplinary knowledge. Interviews were…

Background: Many researchers have investigated student reasoning in Newtonian mechanics. In 1979 Viennot revealed that most students associate the concept of force with the velocity or acceleration of a motion. Forty years later, student understandings remain a major challenge for teachers. The implications of this challenge are still unclear,…