Time is an important but complex area of learning for students in the primary years. This study sought to develop a tool which would provide a clear picture of students' understanding of what constitutes time and how time is related to clock and calendar use. Four major components of time, Awareness of time, Succession, Duration, and Measurement…

Researchers have argued teachers and students are not developing connected meanings for function inverse, thus calling for a closer examination of teachers' and students' inverse function meanings. Responding to this call, we characterize 25 pre-service teachers' inverse function meanings as inferred from our analysis of clinical interviews. After…

In this article, attempts were made to examine students' thinking about the concepts of infinity and their ideas about transiting from finite to infinite states through the concept of limits of sequences. The participants included 78 senior high-school students ranging in age between 17 and 19 years old. The data were collected through a…

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…

Classical mechanics challenges students to use their intuitions and experiences as a basis for understanding, in effect to approach learning as "a refinement of everyday thinking'' (Einstein, 1936). Moving on to quantum mechanics (QM), students, like physicists, need to adjust this approach, in particular with respect to the roles that…

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…

This investigation is focused on possible links between the development of critical attitude and conceptual understanding. We conducted a fine grained analysis of five student teachers' critical and conceptual development during a one hour and a half interaction with an expert. This investigation completes a series of three previous studies…

This study investigated relationships between the thinking processes that 28 undergraduate chemistry students engaged in during guided discovery and their subsequent success at reasoning through a transfer problem during an end-of-semester interview. During a guided-discovery laboratory module, students were prompted to use words, pictures, and…

In recent years, researchers have shown an interest in understanding students' own ideas about basic chemical principles and guiding them through innovative ways to gain conceptual understanding where necessary. This research was a case study designed to assess 50 first year high school students' conceptual understanding about changes in matter,…

The purpose of the study was to examine the influences of age, family socio-economic status (SES), and parents' food knowledge on preschool, kindergarten, and second grade students' conceptual understanding of food and nutrition. Fifty-two parent-child dyads, consisting of 17 preschoolers, 17 kindergartners, and 18 second graders participated in…

The purpose of this phenomenographic study is to examine students' knowledge progression in a three-year Bachelor program in Business Administration. Theoretical sampling was used to select nine students from a group of 200 university students admitted to the program. The students were interviewed on three occasions: Year 1, after their Management…

This study explored first-semester calculus students' understanding of tangent lines as well as how students used tangent lines within the context of Newton's method. Task-based interviews were conducted with twelve first-semester calculus students who were asked to verbally describe a tangent line, sketch tangent lines for multiple curves, and…

Several challenges arise when researchers or practitioners attempt to assess the literacy skills of toddlers, including a lack of developmentally appropriate measures, toddlers' more limited communication ability, and how literacy is defined in the years before age three. This paper describes four new measures of early literacy development and…

Multiplicative thinking has been widely accepted as a critically important "big idea" of mathematics and one which underpins much mathematical understanding beyond the primary years of schooling. It is therefore of importance to consider the capacity of children to think multiplicatively but also to consider the capacity of their…

Sociology research methods students in 2013 and 2016 implemented a series of "real world" data gathering activities that enhanced their learning while assisting the department with ongoing program assessment and program review. In addition to the explicit collection of program assessment data on both students' development of sociological…