Asking questions is one of the key external indicators of curiosity and a cornerstone of scientific inquiry. To understand the types of questions students ask in an introductory college science class for preservice elementary teachers, students used an online question-ranking tool (Google Moderator) as part of the daily routine. This study…

The purpose of this study is to examine the manner in which the features of a constructivist learning environment, and the mechanisms at its base, are expressed in junior high school students' conceptions. Our research is based on an integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches, deigned to provide a wider ranging and deeper…

Prior knowledge is a very important part of teaching and learning, as it affects how instructors and students interact with the learning materials. In general, tests are used to assess students' prior knowledge. Nevertheless, conventional testing approaches usually assign only an overall score to each student, and this may mean that students are…

To address the Council on Accreditation of Parks, Recreation, Tourism, and Related Professions accreditation standard 7.01.01, the Entry Level Competency Assessment was developed to measure 46 competencies in four categories needed by entry level professionals. Students rated their competence prior to beginning their senior internship. The results…

This study investigates how prior content knowledge and prior exposure to microscope slides on the phases of mitosis effect students' visual search strategies and their ability to differentiate cells that are going through any phases of mitosis. Two different sets of microscope slide views were used for this purpose; with high and low colour…

In this report, I examine what students noticed as they participated in an instructional unit on quadratic functions and how a shift in what they noticed was conceptually connected to productive changes in their prior knowledge about linear functions. My results show that, over the course of the instructional unit, students' attention shifted…

Children's picture books that recreate, parody, or fictionalize famous artworks and introduce the art museum experience, a genre to which I will refer as "children's art books," have become increasingly popular over the past decade. This essay explores the pedagogical implications of this trend through the family program "Picture Books and Picture…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of an integrated experiential learning and action research project on preservice science teachers' developing ideas about science teaching, learning, and action research itself. The qualitative, interpretive study examined the action research of 10 master's degree students who…

We report on the survey responses of 51 students attending mathematics bridging courses at a major Australian university, investigating what mathematics, if any, these students had studied in the senior years of schooling and what factors affected their decisions about the level of mathematics chosen. Quantitative findings are augmented by…

Existing reading assessments have increasingly been criticized by researchers, educators, and policy makers, especially regarding their coverage, utility, and authenticity (e.g., Magliano, Millis, Ozuru, & McNamara, 2007; Pellegrino, Chudowsky, & Glaser, 2001; Rupp, Ferne, & Choi, 2006). Specifically, there is concern that current…

This study aims to explore pre-service elementary teachers' understandings of the environment. A survey method was carried out in this study. A close-ended questionnaire and Draw-An-Environment Test (DAET) are administered to pre-service teachers (N = 255) after instruction of an Environmental Education course. A rubric (DAET-R) is used for…

Much research has explored the extent to which statistical computations account for the extraction of linguistic information. However, it remains to be studied how language-specific constraints are imposed over these computations. In the present study we investigated if the violation of a word-forming rule in Catalan (the presence of more than one…

This study employed eye-tracking technology to examine how students with different levels of prior knowledge process text and data diagrams when reading a web-based scientific report. Students' visual behaviors were tracked and recorded when they read a report demonstrating the relationship between the greenhouse effect and global climate…

Science presents many challenging topics, and incorrect prior knowledge of them often interferes with learning. Research has demonstrated that refutation texts promote conceptual change learning by helping readers abandon scientific misconceptions. Little is known about the factors that influence knowledge enrichment, the learning that ensues when…

This paper surveys the consequences of pupils' participation in the extra-curricular environmental education (EE) programme Club P.A.N. (Peoples, Animals and Nature) by monitoring changes in their respective knowledge as well as in their environmental attitudes. The programme was conducted in Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa with the help of the local…