Student cognition in response to intuitive and counterintuitive stimuli in the school science curriculum is not well understood. To address this issue, this study examines high school students' cognitive responses to three counterintuitive physics problems. Our analysis reveals that student success in arriving at counter-intuitive physical…

Students in first-year physics courses generally focus on hunting for suitable equations and formulas when tackling a variety of physical situations and physics problems. There is a need for a framework that can guide them to disciplinary ways of thinking and help them begin to think like physicists. To serve this end, in this study, a framework…

While Shulman argues that an important component of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is teachers' understanding of the alternative conceptions commonly held by students, relatively little is known about what students believe about many topics in the school curriculum. This paper focuses on a content area typically featured in Geography…

This article explores 11- to 16-year-old students' explanations for phenomena commonly studied in school chemistry from an inclusive cognitive resources or knowledge-in-pieces perspective that considers that student utterances may reflect the activation of knowledge elements at a range of levels of explicitness. We report 5 themes in student…