Laboratory activities are a prevalent and essential part of chemistry learning because of their potential to help students develop problem solving abilities, visualize chemistry concepts learned in lecture, and gain practical skills. However, learning in the laboratory environment is not without its challenges. For example, cookbook-style…

"Representational transformation diagrams" are used to compare and contrast standard textbook presentations of vector line integrals in undergraduate courses in both mathematics and physics. These presentations are taken as the lower anchor in a learning trajectory. Two principal approaches in the lower division are identified, roughly…

Quantum mechanics (QM) has become part of many secondary school curricula. These curricula often do not include the mathematical tools for a formal, mathematical introduction of QM. QM therefore needs to be taught at a more conceptual level, but making secondary school students understand counterintuitive QM concepts without introducing…

Current initiatives to transform undergraduate STEM education in the United States advocate for the use of multidimensional learning, wherein instruction provides opportunities for students to gain competency with fundamental or cross-disciplinary concepts and practices. To achieve this goal, the discipline-based education research (DBER)…

The Ubiquitous-Physics (U-Physics) app was upgraded to help students in learning inclined plane concepts. The new version of U-Physics allows students to see the experimental data not only in a graphical representation but also in a tabular representation. U-Physics provides a whiteboard function to support data explanations. The study…

A new undergraduate inorganic chemistry laboratory experiment is presented. An introduction of the spectrochemical series and ligand exchange is explored using the coordination complex dirhodium tetraacetate, Rh[subscript 2](OAc)[subscript 4]. Students have measured the absorption spectra of the Rh[subscript 2] complex in the presence of various…

College biology courses commonly use diagrams to convey information. These visual representations are embedded in course materials with the expectation that students can comprehend and learn from them. Educational research, however, suggests that many students have difficulty understanding diagrams and the conventions (e.g., labels, arrows) they…

In science classrooms, the epistemic practices of explanation building and argumentation often extend over multiple episodes of talk during a single lesson or across several lessons. Analyzing this kind of discourse requires a way to identify patterns that emerge over time to better understand student participation and how teachers support…

Graphical representations are an important tool used to model abstract processes in fields such as chemistry. Successful interpretation of a graph involves a combination of mathematical expertise and discipline-specific content to reason about the relationship between the variables and to describe the phenomena represented. In this work, we…

A digital instructional game with embedded multimedia was believed not limited to allowing the learner to visualize chemistry concepts while playing but enable them to collect relevant information that connects the understanding of the other. The subject was described as a core science area with multiple macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic…

Helping preservice teachers use hybrid language representations in science is important if they are to become scientifically literate and able to engage in the discourse for understanding scientifiyc issues. Using hybrid language representations based on the framework of computer-supported collaborative learning, the teacher educator applied the…

In chemistry, novices and experts use mental models to simulate and reason about sub-microscopic processes. Animations are thus important tools for learning in chemistry to convey reaction dynamics and molecular motion. While there are many animations available and studies showing the benefit of learning from animations, there are also limitations…

This study examines the use of an explicit, reflective method for teaching the difference and relationship between scientific theories and laws to ninth-grade students. Students reflected individually and then as a whole class on theories and laws using a Venn diagram, both before and after reading short articles describing features of theories…

Dealing with multiple external representations (MERs) in science education is the key to students' understanding of science communication and becoming scientifically literate. It is generally accepted that learning scientific concepts, processes, and principles requires understanding and interacting with MERs. Science can be understood as a…

This research focuses on students' tactic assessments of 3 correlations with illustrated 2-step strategic map and animated presentations in stoichiometry. The participants were divided into 2 learning groups: the experimental and the control group by quasi-experimental approach. Most of all, experimental group participants have been contingent on…