The demand for improving student interest in science has increased efforts toward teaching Einstein's theory of general relativity in schools. Research has already shown that teaching Einsteinian gravity at the secondary level is feasible, however, appropriate resources must be readily available for science teachers to make Einsteinian gravity…

This study aimed to explore Omani teachers' self-efficacy beliefs for teaching science as inquiry and investigate the influence of demographic characteristics such as gender, teaching experience, and preparation programme on their beliefs. The study was conducted with a sample of science teachers for grades 5-8 (n=588). Data collected from…

Students' academic performance in chemistry can be the result of a number of cognitive and affective factors. This study explored the influence of the discipline-specific cognitive factors of knowledge structure, cognitive perspectives, and cognitive patterns on grade 9 students' chemistry performance. One instrument measured chemistry academic…

A remote laboratory that measures the enthalpy of vaporization ([delta]"H"[subscript vap]°) and the entropy of vaporization ([delta]"S"[subscript vap]°) of "n"-octane was designed, constructed, and offered to second-year physical chemistry undergraduates at the University of New England (UNE) and Curtin University.…

Students hold many alternative conceptions of thermal physics which are very resistant to change. A conceptual change strategy, the thinking frames approach, based on evidence from educational research was used to address commonly held naïve conceptions about heat in a series of thermal physics lessons. Students' gains in conceptual understanding…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the process of students' construction of scientific explanations through drawing explanatory diagrams. For this, we observed fifth and sixth graders' drawing processes in a gifted science class involving learning physics concepts in mechanics. The analysis was carried out on three pictorial…

Educational reforms in Qatar have seen the implementation of inquiry-based learning and other student-centred pedagogies. However, there have been few efforts to investigate how these adopted western pedagogies are aligned with the high context culture of Qatar. The study presented in this article highlights the implementation of a student-centred…

Understanding plate tectonics is pivotal to development of an integrated understanding of Geoscience topics. However, geology is frequently introduced to students in lower secondary school by describing separate processes, such as sedimentary rock formation, rather than investigating the overall driving forces for change. This study investigated…

This study provides an analysis of selected aspects of the intended curriculum related to redox reactions as represented in secondary chemistry textbooks from the People's Republic of China, with a special view also on Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan, and the Chinese minority in Malaysia. This study reveals how chemistry textbooks deal with visual…

The topic of natural selection presents challenges to high school students since it requires understanding of an emergent process, which is a missing schema for most students. Many interventions for teaching natural selection have limited effect in bringing about substantial ontological conceptual change. This study evaluates the effectiveness of…

The laboratory instruction sheet (sometimes called a laboratory manual), together with the equipment used by students, is an essential resource for laboratory work. It has a direct influence over all the interactions that can occur in the laboratory activity, of which student-equipment is the only common synchronous interaction in both…

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…

The purpose of this research was to investigate an efficient method to assess year 8 (age 13-14) students' conceptual understanding of heat and temperature concepts. Two different types of instruments were used in this study: Type 1, consisting of multiple-choice items with open-ended justifications; and Type 2, consisting of two-tier…

Laboratories play a crucial role in the undergraduate science curriculum and the effectiveness of learning in laboratories is influenced by learners' interactions with other students, the instructors, and the equipment used. In this study, a pre-lab survey was used to collect information about students' expectations of interactions in chemistry…

Pedagogical practitioners who emphasise active learning in undergraduate chemistry courses widely use the Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) instrument to measure students' perceptions of their gains in knowledge and skills in chemistry. Although numerous studies have reported SALG results in support of successful pedagogical…