Molecular biology can be challenging for undergraduate students because it requires visual literacy skills to interpret abstract representations of submicroscopic concepts, structures, and processes. The Conceptual-Reasoning-Mode framework suggests that visual literacy relies on applying conceptual knowledge to appropriately reason with the…

Students need a strong understanding of how to represent chemical compounds in order to succeed in organic chemistry. This project set out to gain a better understanding of students' difficulties with symbolic representations, by identifying the specific errors associated with drawing wedge-dash structures. The focus was on how students…

This investigation of student and instructor representations of molecular orbitals (MOs) uses the knowledge from a community of practice to build collective pedagogical content knowledge of student understanding of molecular orbital representations in the foundation-level inorganic chemistry course. Participants were asked to sketch the bonding…

Energy is a concept frequently encountered both in daily life and in various disciplines. Despite such a wide range of scope, conceptualizing it might be challenging at times. This study aims to investigate high school students' views on the concept of energy through a set of various paper-and-pencil tests. For this purpose, 654 high school…

This study examined the impact of spatial ability on science achievement by distinguishing between domain-general and domain-specific spatial abilities, focusing on their relationship with the conceptual understanding of the apparent path of the sun. Additionally, the mediating effects of domain-specific spatial knowledge on the relationships…

In this study, the impact of the Environmental and Climate Change Education program on the perceptions of 4th-grade students regarding environmental issues, climate change, and sustainability was investigated. The study group consisted of 22 (12 boys, 10 girls) 4th-grade students aged between 9-10 years, who were all studying in the same class at…

Design-based learning is considered a powerful way to help students apply and develop understanding of science concepts, but research has shown that the success of this approach is not a given. Examining students' understanding of science concepts in various design-based learning contexts has thus continued to be an important field of research. To…

Visual representations of information are prevalent in many academic domains, and students must learn how to interpret and use these visual representations. How do students acquire this representational competence? Past work has focused on the role of explicit instruction. In this work, we consider another route for acquiring representational…

Background: To support collaborative drawing, it is essential to investigate how students make collaborative drawings and how these contribute to elaborating their ideas. This study examines how 5th and 6th grade students' group drawings contributed to increased levels of explanations of their drawings about sound transmission. Methods: We…

Being able to move between different representations levels (macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic) is important to understand a chemical phenomenon meaningfully. The current study investigated how pre-service science teachers moved from symbolic representation to sub-microscopic representation. A total of 205 pre-service science teachers,…

Students in an animal physiology course are required to have completed prerequisite cell biology and genetics courses that include discussion of basic properties and functions of the cell membrane. However, while many students remember basic information about membrane structure, they often have difficulty relating that structure to membrane…

Many approaches to teaching Newman projections and conformational manipulation rely on lecturing using only two-dimensional representations. While molecular models are recognized as useful learning tools, students are often left to figure out how to use them during the initial learning process. The availability of basic online molecular models…

The educational benefit of the traditional didactic lecture to learners in Higher Education is hotly debated. Given increasing student numbers, existing technical set ups and many logistical concerns, lectures remain the norm in many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). In this personal view piece, we discuss the benefits, opportunities, and…

In secondary school, where students begin to be more interested in physics, chemistry and biology, it is an important issue how their interests are in terms of all three subject areas according to grade levels. The aim of this study was to examine and evaluate the interest of secondary school students in the concepts of physics, chemistry and…

This study investigated students' conceptions of science learning before and after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak via drawing analysis. A total of 521 Taiwanese students in 7th, 9th, and 11th grades were asked to illustrate how they conceptualized science learning in an actual and ideal context. A coding checklist was developed to analyze the…