Research Findings: Grounded on personification storytelling, this intervention study introduced a science program including extensive astronomy concepts to 24 children (4-5 years). The storytelling attributes personal characteristics to cosmic bodies with metaphors relating to children's lives in explaining the scientific concepts, for example,…

A variety of practices and specialised representational systems are required to understand, communicate and construct molecular genetics knowledge. This study describes teachers' use of multimodal representations of molecular genetics concepts and how their strategies and choice of resources were interpreted, understood and used by students to…

There is a growing interest in the value of teachers guiding students to generate their own representations to support conceptual learning in science and across complementary subjects such as mathematics. However, this approach to an interdisciplinary focus poses challenges for programme design and learning assessment. In this paper, we report on…

The use of recorded lecture videos (RLVs) in mathematics instruction continues to advance. Prior research at the post-secondary level has indicated a tendency for RLV use in mathematics to be negatively correlated with academic performance, although it is unclear whether this is because regular users are generally weaker mathematics students…

This one-semester, mixed methods study underpinning social cognition and theory of planned behaviour investigated the attitudes, self-efficacy, and experiences of 559 first year undergraduate chemistry students from two cohorts in modified process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) classes. Versions of attitude toward the study of chemistry…

Burgeoning college enrolments and insufficient funding to higher education have expanded the use of large lecture courses. As this trend continues, it is important to ensure that students can still learn in those challenging learning environments. Within education broadly and undergraduate engineering specifically, active learning pedagogies have…

This work focused on increasing Year 3 students' use of critical thinking and taking the "second-person perspective" (2ndPP) when interpreting and resolving life issues. Previous research indicated the Personal Viewpoints Pedagogy (PVP) elicited social thinking that exhibited strong perspective-taking and precursors to critical thinking…

This paper focuses on the development of the academic and personal literacy and numeracy skills of pre-service teachers. It examines how an embedded enhancement framework of literacy and numeracy support named the DEER (Developing, Embedding, Extending, Reflecting) framework by the researchers was created in initial teacher education (ITE)…

Australian and international research has identified that many generalist teachers have limited confidence and experience in teaching the Arts in the early years of schooling and education. There is also a significant gap in the provision of quality professional learning programs for teachers. Research has identified that appropriate training and…

Agentic orientation, critical thinking (CrT) and taking the fourth-person perspective (4PP) are described as teachable attainments. A Personal Viewpoints (PVs) Biblical Studies curriculum challenged Year 7 students to resolve socially problematic situations through group discussion and perspective-taking. A life-issue scenario was used to pre- and…

The variability effect occurs when learners' exposure to highly variable tasks results in better learning. It was hypothesised that learners who studied high variability worked examples would obtain higher post-test scores compared to learners who studied low variability examples, and learners who self-generated problem solutions for the same high…

Because different musical scales use different sets of intervals and, hence, different musical pitches, how do music listeners learn those that are in their native musical system? One possibility is that musical pitches are acquired in the same way as phonemes, that is, via distributional learning, in which learners infer knowledge from the…

Learning how to comprehend while listening to a second language is often considered by learners to be a difficult process that can lead to anxiety when trying to communicate (Graham, 2006; Graham & Macaro, 2008). Computer-mediated communication (CMC) can be used to assist in increasing access to native speakers and opportunities to listen.…

Education for sustainable development (ESD) espouses student-centred, transformative pedagogies that promote learning through active, participatory and experiential learning. Yet, traditional lectures provide limited opportunities for engaging students in such pedagogies. This article reports on the inclusion of sustainability pedagogies within…

Although the benefits of addressing cognitive, social and affective aspects of learning in order to support conceptual change have been discussed in the literature, there are few studies of such interventions in the normal classroom. This study used a multidimensional conceptual change framework in order to teach five biology and physics topics…