The aim of study is to compare the contributions of virtual and real museum tours in terms of perceived presence and knowledge retention. The sample of study which was 28 third graders enrolled in a public primary school in an informal instructional process. There were two groups (virtual group and real group); one visited virtual museum (n=14),…

When a student explains a biological phenomenon, does the answer reflect only the "product of retrieving knowledge" or does it also reflect a "dynamic process of constructing knowledge?" To gain insight into students' dynamic knowledge, we leveraged three analytic frameworks--structures--behaviors--functions (SBF), mental…

The purpose of this study was to investigate students' understanding of groundwater as a system, and to further examine whether and how their understanding is related to attitudes towards groundwater use and conservation. A total of 676 junior high school students completed a groundwater survey including a drawing activity and a questionnaire. An…

Research has shown that hands-on activities in biology/science education tend to improve children's attitudes towards science. These hands-on activities can influence children's interest in various ways, perhaps because they invoke varying emotions. We used a sample of 10-12-year-old children (n = 142) to examine the effect of hands-on activities…

Insects are the most abundant and diverse group of animals on Earth. Though as a group they do far more ecological good than harm, previous studies have shown that human attitudes toward insects are mainly negative. Attitudes have affective (emotions) and cognitive (beliefs, mental representations) components that interact to influence behavior.…

The aim of this study is to determine 9th class students knowledge about the internal structures of mice and cockroaches using drawings. Drawings of 122 students from the 9th class of a high school in the center of Konya about the internal structures of mice and cockroaches have been analyzed. Drawings were analyzed independently by two…

Traditional forms of assessment, mainly by written tests and examinations, cannot be said to be fair in a multicultural, multilingual environment. In South African public schools, home language is strongly associated with socioeconomic context, with both factors related to performance in traditional assessments. Children attending poor public…

The focus on standardized testing in the areas of reading and mathematics in early elementary education often minimalizes science and the arts in the curriculum. The science topics of health and nutrition were integrated into the reading curriculum through read aloud books. Inclusion of creativity skills through figural transformation drawings…

The present study replicated research conducted decades earlier (Goldman & Goldman, 1982a; Koch, 197480) on what children in the United States know about conception and birth compared to those in other countries. Specifically, response drawings by 48 six-year-old boys and girls from England, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States were…

This pilot study examined the feasibility of a home-school partnership for improving emergent literacy skills in Spanish-speaking pre-school children of migrant farmworkers. Parents were requested to send labeled drawings of family activities to their children's classroom for supplementing bilingual language and literacy instruction. Participants…

In this article we report on the 'sense-making' by children of a 'scientist' and 'science'. We investigated these conceptions through drawings by using the Draw-a-Scientist Test (DAST) developed by Chambers. We conducted the research in two urban schools; a public school located in a low-income previously designated black (African) suburb, and a…

Children's knowledge about human anatomy can be examined through several different ways. Making a drawing of the internal features of the human body has been frequently used in recent studies. However, there might be a serious difference in results obtained from a general instruction to students ("What you think is inside your body") and…

When Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety Scale was administered to 26 healthy and 26 chronically ill children, it was found that the chronically ill were significantly more anxious than the healthy. Results also suggested that the question of sex differences in children's emotional response to illness deserves further investigation in studies…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…