The core function of science education is to equip students with scientific literacy, enabling them to understand complex environmental challenges and actively engage in proenvironmental behaviors. Therefore, understanding students' conceptions of environmental education is crucial for advancing environmental education. In this study, we explored…

Although existing literature suggests that teachers perceive, mobilize, and leverage resources to support ambitious instruction, less is known about how teachers and students jointly take up resources for co-constructing scientific knowledge. This study examines how teachers and students utilize aspects of practice-oriented curriculum materials…

An understanding of how sensemaking unfolds when elementary students engage in engineering design tasks is crucial to advancing engineering teaching and learning at K-12 levels. Sensemaking has been widely studied in the context of science as a discipline. In this paper, we seek to contribute to the more nascent efforts to build theory about the…

Science education researchers have highlighted how uncertainty can foster meaningful scientific sense-making, supporting students to re-evaluate their understandings of scientific phenomena and pursue deeper causal accounts. However, facilitating whole-class conversations motivated by uncertainty is complex and challenging, calling for further…

Inquiry learning pedagogies have not only been proposed as a successful teaching methodology to draw students into science, they are also rich with possibilities for creativity. The particular focus on investigations and problem-solving provides opportunity for educators to embrace this. The primary curriculum explicitly values creativity in this…

Amid calls for integrating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (iSTEM) in K-12 education, there is a pressing need to uncover productive methods of integration. Prior research has shown that increasing contextual linkages between science and mathematics is associated with student problem solving and conceptual understanding. However,…

Student understanding of biological representations has not been well studied. Yet, we know that to be efficient problem solvers in evolutionary biology and systematics, college students must develop expertise in thinking with a particular type of representation, phylogenetic trees. The purpose of this study was to understand how undergraduates…

Imagistic reasoning appears to be a critical strategy for learning and problem solving in the sciences, particularly chemistry; however, little is known about how students use imagistic reasoning on genuine assessment tasks in chemistry. The present study employed a think-aloud protocol to explore when and how students use imagistic reasoning for…

Classroom assessment is a critical aspect of teaching and learning. In this paper, Taiwanese high school students' conceptions of science assessment and the relationship between their conceptions of science assessment and of science learning were investigated. The study used both qualitative and quantitative methods. First, 60 students were…

Problem-based learning (PBL) is widely endorsed as a desirable learning method, particularly in science. Especially in light of the method's heavy demand on resources, evidence-based practice is called for. Rigorous studies of the method's effectiveness, however, are scarce. In Study 1, college students enrolled in an elementary physics course…

In this study, we test an information-processing model (IPM) of problem solving in science education, namely the working memory overload model, by applying catastrophe theory. Changes in students' achievement were modeled as discontinuities within a cusp catastrophe model, where working memory capacity was implemented as asymmetry and the degree…

Making assumptions is an important step in solving many real-world problems. This study investigated whether participants who could solve well-defined physics problems could also solve a real-world physics problem that involved the need to make assumptions. The participants, who all had at least a BA in physics, were videotaped "thinking aloud"…

Presents results from Singaporean and Australian studies on the relationships between the cognitive variables and problem solving performance in three electrochemistry problems of different degrees of familiarity for comparisons. Concludes that idea association, problem translating skill, prior problem solving experience, specific knowledge, and…

Describes the model-revising problem-solving strategies of two groups of students (one successful, one unsuccessful) as they worked in a genetics course to revise Mendel's simple dominance model to explain the inheritance of a trait expressed in any of four variations. Finds differences in the groups' abilities to recognize anomalous data, use…

Describes a study with the main objective of constructing models based on strategies students use to solve chemistry problems and to show that these models form sequences of progressive transitions termed "problemshifts" that increase the explanatory/heuristic power of the model. Results implies that the relationship between algorithmic…