Video games are a medium most students are familiar with; thus, they can be used as educational tools to meet the needs of twenty-first-century students. Given the popularity of video games with teenagers, they can be incorporated as educational tools in the science classroom. However, the affordances of using Minecraft Education (Minecraft…

The present study investigates the effect of three neo-Piagetian constructs, namely Formal Reasoning (FR), Field Dependence/Independence (FDI) and Divergence (DIV), as well as the effect of age and gender, on students' portrayed representations of the atomic structure, considering their degree of coherence. For this purpose students'…

Despite the importance of computer science education and computational thinking, there have been limited examples of computer science education at K-12 classrooms that authentically represents the work of computer scientists, especially programming. One reason is the lack of a measurable definition of computational thinking and a programming…

In 2 experiments we examined the role of (a) specificity, (b) the type of targeted learning activities, and (c) learners' prior knowledge for the effects of relevance instructions on learning from instructional explanations. In Experiment 1, we recruited novices regarding the topic of atomic structure (N = 80) and found that "specific"…

This work investigates the formation of particular student profiles based on of their ideas relating to basic characteristics of the atom. Participants were secondary students of 8th, 10th and 12th grades from Northern Greece (n = 421), with specific cohort characteristics e.g. age, grade and class curriculum, and individual differences, e.g.…

The current study aims to investigate students' representations of the atomic structure in a number of student cohorts with specific characteristics concerning age, grade, class curriculum and some individual differences, such as formal reasoning and field dependence/independence. Two specific task contexts, which were designed in accordance with…

The overall aim of this article is to analyze the relationships between the roles of assessment in pedagogy, the interactions between curriculum assessment and pedagogy, and the study of pupils' progression in learning. It is argued that well-grounded evidence of pupils' progressions in learning is crucial to the work of teachers, so that a method…