The increasing and diversifying student enrollments in introductory physics courses make reliable, valid, and usable instruments for measuring student skills and gains ever more important. In introductory physics, in addition to teaching facts about mechanics, we also seek to teach our students the skills of "thinking like a physicist,"…

Peer Instruction (PI), a student-centred teaching method, engages students during class through structured, frequent questioning, facilitated by classroom response systems. The central feature of PI is the ConcepTest, a question designed to help resolve student misconceptions around the subject content. Within our coordination chemistry PI…

Interdisciplinary approach is viewed as the best way to learn about and perceive complex scientific phenomena in the real world; therefore, students need to develop interdisciplinary habits of mind in K-12 science education. This article provided a framework for understanding middle school students' interdisciplinary competence that included four…

This research that aimed to (1) produce instruments that were feasible to measure the ability to solve physics problems and nationalism, and (2) determine the quality of instruments that have been developed. This research was conducted through four stages, namely the design, preparation of tests, test trials, and preparation of valid instruments.…

The study was conducted to analyze the items about the ability of high school students diagram representation and obtain Item Curve Characteristic. Grid test instruments are compiled based on competencies and indicators of diagram representation which are then used to compile items. The test instrument consisted of five items and was validated by…

Assessment, including course exams, clearly indicates to students what learning goals they are expected to master in a certain course. However, most of these assessments tend to focus on generating a correct answer rather than on the type of reasoning or skills used to arrive at the answer. If educators value skills in addition to the correctness…

Abilities in scientific thinking and reasoning have been emphasized as core areas of initiatives, such as the Next Generation Science Standards or the College Board Standards for College Success in Science, which focus on the skills the future will demand of today's students. Although there is rich literature on studies of how these abilities…

This study addresses the development and evaluation of the Physics Problem-Solving Taxonomy (PPST), comprising five levels: retrieval, diagnosis, strategy, conceptual, and creative thinking. The taxonomy draws on Bloom's revised taxonomy in the cognitive domain, the Types of Knowledge Taxonomy, and the Problem-Solving Taxonomy in engineering. The…

The different ways microscale and green chemistry allow reducing the deleterious impacts of chemistry on human health and the environment are discussed in terms of their different basic paradigms: green chemistry follows the ecologic paradigm and microscale the risk paradigm. A study of the synthesis of 1-bromobutane at macro- ? microscale (109.3…

We report on a study investigating the influence of context, direction of translation, and function type on undergraduate students' ability to translate between graphical and symbolic representations of mathematical relations. Students from an algebra-based and a calculus-based physics course were asked to solve multiple-choice items in which they…

This article reports the development and validation study of tests to assess achievements at three levels of knowledge structure, following the model proposed by Sugrue to measure problem-solving skills. The literature has reported this proposal as a model consistent with the theoretical constructs underlying problem-based learning (PBL)…

The Physics Metacognition Inventory was developed to measure physics students' metacognition for problem solving. In one of our earlier studies, an exploratory factor analysis provided evidence of preliminary construct validity, revealing six components of students' metacognition when solving physics problems including knowledge of cognition,…

The aim of this study was to create an instrument to measure elementary teachers' interest in teaching chemistry. The interest in chemistry teaching instrument (ICTI) was created to measure both the affective and cognitive components of interest. After establishing the face and content validity of the instrument, the internal consistency of the…

This article discusses the resources available for teachers to apply higher-level thinking and cognitive complexity to their instruction and assessments. While designing higher-level assessments might be a challenging task, doing so not only can improve student achievement in science, it also prepares students for a changing world. Students learn…

Although the scientific inadequacy of Le Chatelier's principle has long been documented in the literature, the principle is still treated as a central concept of chemical equilibrium by textbook writers and teachers in many countries. In the past, researchers' interest has focused on student misconceptions about chemical equilibrium and has…