This study investigated meaning-making of arrows in a representation of the greenhouse effect among 14-year-old secondary school students. Data was generated during Biology lessons where 74 students discussed how they interpreted a representation from the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, which is an NGO that produce school material. The…

This study investigates the effect of teaching enriched with astronomy activities and educational games on astronomy achievement in the 6th-grade Solar System and Eclipses unit. Fifty-seven students in the 6th grade of a secondary school in Türkiye participated in the study. Although the groups were formed randomly, since the students themselves…

Most primary school students, although they grasp the scientific concepts of heat convection at the macroscopic level, commonly fail to visualize those concepts. Therefore, our research aims to enact a constructivist teaching sequence (CTS) to restructure students' visualization changes, ultimately enabling them to synergize macroscopic and…

Instructional explanations are sometimes viewed as part of a nonconstructivist, solely teacher-centered learning environment, leading to the perception that they are ineffective or inappropriate for teaching science. Consequently, teacher education programmes seldom focus on preparing teachers to explain scientific concepts effectively.…

This study aimed to explore Cooperative Learning theories and practice by examining the relationships among three aspects: Experience, Practice and Perceptions. The data were from interview records from eight science teachers. As a student-centered active pedagogical trend, cooperative learning has become part of one of the most effective and…

Biochemistry lab classes help students connect theory to real-world applications and develop practical, collaborative, and higher-order thinking skills. However, many students are unprepared, spending class time on protocols and equipment instead of higher-order learning. To improve preparation, digital gamified modules were created to replace…

This study aims to: 1) Examine the experiences and needs essential for fostering self-directed knowledge construction among science teachers and lower secondary students; and 2) Develop a learning management process to enhance self-directed knowledge construction for lower secondary students. Targeting 35 students from a school in Kalasin province…

This study was conducted to compare the efficacy of Lecture-Based-Learning (LBL) and Cooperative-Learning (CL) in teaching 'classification of living things' to Senior High School (SHS) students in Tamale, Northern Region, Ghana. The study was conducted in two SHSs using two science classes offering Biology during the 2020-2021 academic year. A…

Chemical reasoning takes many forms. The focus in this paper is on a reasoning process that facilitates using experimental evidence to make connections between macroscopic and submicroscopic domains, which we will refer to as "creating representation." It is a particular type of reasoning that has played a critical role in chemistry,…

The purpose of the present study was to understand the nature of the link between science teachers' epistemologies and their socioscientific issue (SSI) teaching discourse. It is important to consider this link due to the limitations of science teachers in shifting from monologic to more dialogic orientations in their teaching, despite SSI-based…

Previous studies suggested that epistemically more sophisticated students learned better in a constructivist learning context than epistemically less sophisticated students did. This study further examined if students with "higher" prior epistemic beliefs (EB High) had better learning gains than students with "lower" prior…

The impact of an interactive in-class Valence-Shell Electron-Pair Repulsion (VSEPR) activity, designed and implemented by the author in her first-year undergraduate chemistry classes, was assessed through the statistical analysis of pre- and posttreatment quizzes on VSEPR theory and the analysis of questionnaires. The activity consisted of…

Analogies can be powerful teaching tools because they can make new material intelligible to students by comparing it to material that is already familiar. In assisting students to understand chemistry concepts, teachers occasionally use analogies. These analogies are believed to help the students to structure the new knowledge and they are…

The paper describes the intent, process, and findings in implementing an online Indigenous People's Social Studies curriculum that incorporates what local cultural institutions have to offer. Constructivism is the main theory embedded with Community of Inquiry, New Museum Theory, and Indigenous New Museum Theory. Subsequent pages describe planning…

Reflection on current practices is key to the transformation of teachers into reflexive practitioners. This study describes how design thinking was integrated in Schön's 'reflection in and on' model, to transform traditional teaching of Biology into constructivist learning. As a first step, the reflection model was used to identify limitations in…