Explaining biological phenomena requires understanding how different processes function and describing interactions between components at various levels of organization over time and space in biological systems. This is a desired competency yet is a complicated and often challenging task for undergraduate biology students. Therefore, we need a…

In natural science education, experiments often lead to the collection of raw data that need to be processed into results by doing calculations. Teaching students how to approach such calculations can be done using digital learning materials that provide guidance. The goal of this study was to investigate students' behaviour regarding the use of…

Introductory biology is a gateway course for majors and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Despite the importance of chemistry content knowledge for understanding biology, the relationship between chemistry knowledge and prior coursework and biology course performance is understudied. We used an opportunity…

Previous work has highlighted the difficulties students have when explaining wave behavior. We present an investigation of chemistry students' understanding of the double-slit experiment, where students were asked to explain a series of PhET simulations illustrating a single continuous light source, single-slit diffraction, and double-slit…

For the past decade, the College of Chemistry at UC Berkeley has iteratively redesigned general chemistry laboratory courses to introduce students to green chemistry concepts, while simultaneously using green chemistry as a relevant context to learn chemistry. To investigate the effectiveness of this curriculum we developed approaches to…

Many learners seem to struggle to grasp the concepts of forces and Newton's law of motion, possibly owing to decontextualised teaching pedagogies used in science classrooms. This study investigates Grade 11 Physical Sciences teachers' perspectives in South Africa on integrating Indigenous Knowledge (IK) to improve learners' understanding of…

'A lack of prior knowledge in the other discipline' is often given by geoscience instructors to explain why students struggle to apply knowledge from other disciplines to the Earth. We examine this assumption by considering the disciplinary crossing of buoyancy (physics) to isostasy (geoscience). We investigate the teachers' perspective through…

Kinematics is an important but challenging area in physics. In previously published works of the current research project, it was revealed that there is a significant relationship between facial microexpression states (FMES) changes and conceptual conflict-induced conceptual change. Consequently, the current study integrated FMES into a kinematics…

The research described here examined the sources of knowledge of astronomy of children (age 3-18) in China and New Zealand, together with the development of their awareness of competing sources, ranging from everyday language, childhood literature and folklore to the scientific accounts prevalent in schools. The authors cite examples of the…

Context is the background or the settings of an event or idea. It is only when events or ideas are considered within the context in which they occur that they can be fully understood. In education, the application of knowledge communicated in one context to a different one is a central feature of learning. However, knowledge transfer can be…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] Uncertainty is an important concept in physics laboratory instruction. However, little work has examined how students reason about uncertainty beyond the introductory (intro) level. In this work we aimed to compare intro and beyond-intro…

In chemistry, building arguments and applying concept knowledge is closely linked to evaluating claims, supporting claims with evidence, and justifying the linkage of evidence to claim with reasoning. However, previous studies revealed that, when building arguments, students experience challenges either in differentiating between argument…

Equally as important as growing the body of human knowledge through scientific discoveries and analysis is relaying this information to the general public in a digestible manner to establish a scientifically literate society. This dissertation approaches the multifaceted issue by combining an in-depth study of brown dwarf binary atmospheres with…

Our goal as educators should be to help our students become well positioned to achieve future success. To develop effective strategies for accomplishing this objective, we must first understand the root causes of success. Thus, to best serve undergraduate students who are taking organic chemistry courses, we must understand the attributes that…

This study investigated the effects of providing domain information in an early stage of an inquiry process, together with an aligned hypothesis scratchpad, on inquiry learning, and hypothesis generation in particular. Participants were provided with basic domain information that was adapted to their prior knowledge (experimental condition) or…