In the context of scholarly and scientific discourse, students often have to deal with graphic-visual modes of communication, which requires their ability to comprehend and utilize inscriptions, that is, scientific visual representations, to convey information effectively--what we call graphical literacy. Despite its pivotal role for training…

Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to one's existing ideas. Despite being two distinct processes, modeling is often described as sensemaking of the…

Over the past several years, we have contributed articles to "TPT" that focus on a forensics-style reexamination of significant historical events. The purpose of these articles is to afford students the opportunity to apply basic principles of physics to unsolved mysteries and potentially settle the historical debate. We assembled the…

Over the past several years, we have contributed several articles to "TPT" that focused on a forensics-style reexamination of historical events. In each article, we presented a case study as a pedagogy for teaching topics from introductory-level physics courses. Recently, we assembled our prior work into a series of…

There is growing interest in implementing reform-based lab courses in undergraduate physics that are student driven rather than instructor driven. In these courses, students develop and carry out experiments while simultaneously reasoning about their hypotheses, data collection procedures, collected evidence, and the relevant physics content.…

A detailed characteristic of teaching and learning approaches used within the new concept of Learning by Being (LBB) is given. The evolution of educational paradigms from Learning by Doing (LBD) and Learning by Understanding (LBU) toward LBB is analyzed. The basic idea of LBB is students' ownership on cognitive goals, or the assumption of learning…

Australian science teachers are asked to involve their students in the scientific processes of inquiry and investigation. The abilities needed for scientific problem-solving ("doing") and the capacity to reflect on the process of problem-solving at a meta level ("understanding") are defined as scientific reasoning competencies…

Engineering design was integrated into K-12 science education in the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States, 2013), but teaching design remains a challenge for educators. Design problems are ill-defined, ill-structured, and complex problem-solving tasks. Their solutions require creativity and recursive, metacognitive…

This case study describes how our research team conducted the qualitative think-aloud approach (or cognitive pretesting) to obtaining cognitive validity evidence for a biology inference-making and reasoning measure for undergraduate students. The main goal of our work was to gather high-quality student think-aloud data of reasoning while they were…

Mathematical sense-making--looking for coherence between the structure of the mathematical formalism and causal or functional relations in the world--is a core component of physics expertise. Some physics education research studies have explored what mathematical sense-making looks like at the introductory physics level, while some historians and…

Research in computer-based learning environments has long recognized the vital role of adaptivity in promoting effective, individualized learning among students. Adaptive scaffolding capabilities are particularly important in open-ended learning environments, which provide students with opportunities for solving authentic and complex problems, and…

This study aimed to investigate the relationships among the middle school students' perceptions of science teacher support, students' motivation and students' engagement in learning science. Student motivation was addressed with task value and academic self-concept while student engagement included aspects of agentic, behavioural, emotional and…

Science education has an important role in children's understanding of the world, making the right decisions in accordance with their perceptions, using problem solving skills and scientific attitudes. In this study, the effects of activities prepared by considering the needs of visually impaired students on the development of scientific process…

A growing body of scholarly work indicates that student performance on physics problems stems from many factors, including relevant conceptual understanding. However, in contexts in which significant conceptual difficulties have been documented via research, it can be difficult to pinpoint and isolate such factors because students' written and…

Recent science reform documents have called for incorporating authentic scientific discourse into science classes as engaging in discourse has shown to result in numerous benefits. Whether these benefits are observed in students depends upon the quality of the discourse in which they engage. However, characterizing the quality of student-student…