Evidence suggests that some students have learned procedures with little or no underpinning understanding while others have a much more connected and conceptual levels of understanding. In this article, the work of four primary students is discussed in terms of their contextual understanding of multiplicative concepts. The difference between…

Thirty years ago, when personal computers were first becoming available in homes and schools, a large group of primary school-age children were asked to share their attitudes about computers, their conceptions regarding how computers function, and their beliefs concerning computers' agency. The researchers wanted to gather baseline data regarding…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Astronomy Education Research.] In this paper we discuss the design and development of a learning progression (LP) to describe and interpret students' understanding about stellar structure and evolution (SSE). The LP is built upon three content dimensions: "hydrostatic equilibrium";…

This chapter describes a multidisciplinary faculty self-study about reciprocity in service-learning. The study began with each coauthor participating in a Decoding interview. We describe how Decoding combined with collaborative self-study had a positive impact on our teaching practice.

We propose a process of contextualization based on seven empirically derived contextualization principles, aiming to provide opportunities for Indigenous Mexican adolescents to learn science in a way that supports them in fulfilling their right to an education aligned with their own culture and values. The contextualization principles we…

The purpose of this study was to examine the abstraction thinking or the vertical reorganization activity of mathematical concepts of high school students while taking account of the abstraction that was constructed earlier, and the socio-cultural background. This study was qualitative in nature with task-based interviews as the method of…

This study explored 5-6 year-old children's conceptual understanding of one geometric shape, the triangle. It focused on whether children could draw a triangle from memory, and identify triangles of different types, sizes, and orientations. The data were collected from 82 children attending state preschool programs through a one-on-one interview,…

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…

Relating mathematical concepts to graphical representations is a challenging task for students. In this paper, we introduce two visual strategies to qualitatively interpret the divergence of graphical vector field representations. One strategy is based on the graphical interpretation of partial derivatives, while the other is based on the flux…

This article investigates the approach of care as curriculum and teachers' perceptions of this notion. It is a descriptive account of the interviews of four Aotearoa New Zealand-based infant and toddler teachers' perceptions of care as curriculum. Care as curriculum is a pedagogical approach that was brought to the research process. This was an…

The structure of Russians' life course has never been studied in depth; the only exception is demographic studies regarding marital status and age at childbirth. Principles that define life trajectories should also be examined. The "adult" concept is one of a number of important concepts in the general structure of life planning. This…

This chapter presents the bottlenecks identified by seven faculty members from diverse disciplines and an inductive content analysis of their Decoding interviews. Representative quotations illustrate themes in the interviews and we consider the implications for both faculty development and pedagogical research.

This paper proposes a model-based notion of "submicro representations of chemical reactions". Based on three structural models of matter (the simple particle model, the atomic model and the free electron model of metals), we suggest there are two major models of reaction in school chemistry curricula: (a) reactions that are simple…

Pupils' conceptual change processes that have led to long-term changes in learning processes can be very challenging and interwoven with several issues. Meanwhile, school learning is often determined as fragmented, without providing connections to pupils' different life and societal contexts. In this study, Science, Technology, and Society (STS)…

Visual and analytic strategies are features of students' schemes for spatial tasks. The strategies used by six students to anticipate the folding of nets were investigated. Evidence suggested that visual and analytic strategies were strongly connected in competent performance.