The communities of practice (COP) framework describes learning as a process of navigating one's position of membership within a community of professionals pursuing a set of common goals using established practices. As students navigate their membership within a community like a physics research group, they develop a mental model of the community…

London dispersion forces (LDFs) are the most fundamental of the noncovalent interactions in that they are interactions that act between all molecular species and require only that students can use the "electron cloud" model of atomic structure. In this longitudinal study we investigate how students respond to prompts, designed to elicit…

Promoting student understanding of ecosystem processes is critical to biological education. Yet, teaching complex life systems can be difficult because systems are dynamic and often behave in a non-linear manner. In this paper, we discuss assessment results from a middle school classroom intervention in which a conceptual representation framework…