This study aims to develop and validate a Constructivist Learning Environment Model to address secondary students' misconceptions in learning Science. Employing a Design and Development approach (Richey & Klein, 2007), the research is conducted in two phases. Phase 1 focuses on model design, drawing from an extensive literature review to…

This study investigates the impact of constructivist teaching methods on achievement and misconceptions in mechanics, with a focus on gender differences. The research involved 88 first-year physics students enrolled in the physics teacher training program. Using a quasi-experimental design, students were divided into experimental (constructivist…

Algebra is an important branch of mathematics which applies to many fields related to mathematics. However, many studies show algebra as posing problems even to the most gifted students. This phenomenon, therefore, necessitates more studies to be conducted in this area. As such, the study explored the types of errors that Grade 8 learners…

Analogies can be powerful teaching tools because they can make new material intelligible to students by comparing it to material that is already familiar. In assisting students to understand chemistry concepts, teachers occasionally use analogies. These analogies are believed to help the students to structure the new knowledge and they are…

Increasingly, educators in the biological and social sciences teach about the concept of race from a social constructionist perspective. Scholarship on race pedagogy suggests that to fully appreciate the complexity of race, students must be able to both deconstruct multiple false beliefs about the fixed nature of race (i.e., racial essentialism)…

This inquiry sought to investigate the opportunities and potential challenges of engaging in a self-study approach as a strategy for enhancing professional growth during my teaching of the topic of evolutionary genetics to 24 twelfth-grade students. I had, for many years, experienced pedagogical deficits and shortcomings when teaching evolutionary…

Despite statistics learning becoming more important during this information explosion era, many students still deem the subject complex and challenging. Measures of dispersion, a critical component of statistical knowledge that students often struggle with, have received little attention in research on statistics education. The goal of this study…

Our research with Grade 9 learners at a school in Soweto was conducted to explore learners' understanding of fundamental fraction concepts used in applications required at that level of schooling. The study was based on the theory of constructivism in a bid to understand whether learners' transition from whole numbers to rational numbers enabled…

Developing tools to identify students' misconceptions about basic biology concepts is necessary. Therefore, a two-tier diagnostic test was developed to determine such misconceptions in primary school (3rd-4th Grade) students. The test content includes two-tiered multiple-choice questions addressing common misconceptions found in the literature on…

Purpose: As technology enables the rapid spread of mis- and disinformation, a critical challenge for scholars and practitioners involves building student's news media literacy (NML), a subset of media literacy education centered around journalism. This paper aims to offer a case study of secondary civics classrooms that use NML lessons and current…

The 21st-century mathematics classrooms should equip learners with well-grounded knowledge and thinking skills pertaining to geometry. However, Euclidean geometry remains one of the challenging, if not the most difficult topic for many learners. As a result, the purpose of this article is to interpret Grade 12 learners' learning difficulties in…

Understanding why teachers teach the way they do is important especially in a time of curriculum reforms. Hence, the aim of this research is to unpack the secondary school physical science teachers' beliefs on the purposes and goals of science teaching (PGST) and to check the alignment of their beliefs on PGST with constructivism. A convergent…

With the introduction of internet as a source of information, parents have observed youngsters' tendency to prefer internet as a source, and almost a reluctance to learn in advance since "you can look it up when needed". Questions arise, such as 'Are these phenomena symptoms of changing beliefs about knowledge and learning? Is it at all…

To support university students' learning, teaching should build on students' prior knowledge. Therefore, teachers need skills to pay attention to students' knowledge in teaching-learning situations. Teachers' underlying conceptual knowledge affects the way they see and interpret situations in classrooms, which is called professional vision. This…

Researchers have documented many misconceptions students hold about sampling variability. This study takes a different approach--instead of identifying shortcomings, we consider the productive reasoning pieces students construct as they reason about sampling distributions. We interviewed eight undergraduate students newly enrolled in an…