Background: To support collaborative drawing, it is essential to investigate how students make collaborative drawings and how these contribute to elaborating their ideas. This study examines how 5th and 6th grade students' group drawings contributed to increased levels of explanations of their drawings about sound transmission. Methods: We…

An understanding of how science is enacted and how scientific knowledge is generated, or the nature of science (NOS), is a major goal of science education. NOS views have almost exclusively been assessed using the Views of Nature of Science (VNOS) suite of instruments, which consists of open-ended questions. The purpose of this study was to…

It is important to be able to make better informed decisions about issues such as sustainability and climate change that have both personal and global impact as early as possible in life. Primary teachers have a significant role in supporting students' learning and understanding of these concepts. One important teaching skill that needs to be…

Central to evolution is the concept of a common ancestry from which all life has emerged over immense time scales, but learning and teaching temporal aspects of evolution remain challenging. This study investigated students' interpretation of evolutionary time when engaging with a multi-touch tabletop application called DeepTree, a dynamic…

This article explores how creative visual imagination and creative thinking can help children to construct mental models of space. A mixed-method study, integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches and involving 98 five-year-old children (54 girls and 44 boys) demonstrated that creative visual imagination, rather than creative thinking, is…

The purpose of this design based research study was to better understand and build from students' perceptual experiences of visual representations of the greenhouse effect. Twenty undergraduate students were interviewed as they engaged with an online visualization for the learning of the greenhouse effect. We found that, even though all students…

Cross-grade studies are valuable for the development of sequential curriculum. However such studies are time and resource intensive and fail to provide a clear representation to integrate different levels of representational complexity. Lin (Lin, 2006; Lin & Chiu, 2006; Lin, Chiu, & Hsu, 2006) proposed a cladistics approach in conceptual…

Computer-based simulations can help students visualize chemical representations and understand chemistry concepts, but simulations at different levels of representation may vary in effectiveness on student learning. This study investigated the influence of computer activities that simulate chemical reactions at different levels of representation…

Based on the importance and widely use of visualization in science, this article has a three-fold aim related to the terms of visualization, representation and model that in recent years have been introduced to the field of science education without clear differentiation. Firstly, the three terms are discussed with examples to provide a common…

In secondary science education, the learning and teaching of coherent conceptual understanding are often problematic. Context-based education has been proposed as a partial solution to this problem. This study aims to gain insight into the development of conceptual coherence and how context-embedded learning-teaching activities (LT) can promote…

It has been shown that facial expression states of learners are related to their learning. As part of a continuing research project, the current study delved further for a more detailed description of the relation between facial microexpression state (FMES) changes and learning in conceptual conflict-based instructions. Based on the data gathered…

Visualizations are an increasingly important part of scientific education and discovery. However, users often do not gain knowledge from them in a complete or efficient way. This article aims to direct research on visualizations in science education in productive directions by reviewing the evidence for widespread assumptions that learning styles,…

A research study was carried out to measure the effect of a computer animation as part of the assessment of conceptual understanding of second-semester general chemistry students. The major impact of the animation was observed to be in minimizing the difficulty students have in visualizing the particle motions for each distractor.

Visualization is the process by which one is able to create and sustain mental images for observation, analysis, and experimentation. This study consists of a compilation of evidence from historical examples that were collected in order to document the importance and the uses of visualization within the realm of scientific investigation.…

Focuses on images of energy that may help to construct key scientific concepts. Analyzes interpretations given by students of documents containing images evoking ideas that are seldom visually explained within a theoretical semiotic frame. Confirms the utility of this frame and suggests some abilities needed for students to correctly interpret…