Designing and interpreting controlled experiments are important inquiry skills addressed in many current science curricula. The relevant skills associated with the design and interpretation of controlled experiments are summarised under the term control-of-variables strategy (CVS). Research on elementary school students' CVS skills shows that they…

Many modern anatomy curricula teach histology using virtual microscopes, where students inspect tissue slices in a computer program (e.g. a web browser). However, the educational data mining (EDM) potential of these virtual microscopes remains under-utilized. In this paper, we use EDM techniques to investigate three research questions on a virtual…

Cognitive activation is one of the central quality characteristics of teaching. Studies which analyzed cognitive activation in science instruction and its influence on the achievement and the interest of students, took most of the times place in higher grades. Since scientific thinking can be taught at a very early stage and, in particular,…