The climate, being a complex system, is difficult for people to understand. If better education is to be designed to improve the public's understanding of the subject, educators must be aware of the prior knowledge that students bring with them to the classroom since it is through that prism that people make sense of the world. As such, the aim of…

When conducting scientific research, experts in molecular and cellular biology (MCB) use specific reasoning strategies to construct mechanistic explanations for the underlying causal features of molecular phenomena. We explored how undergraduate students applied this scientific practice in MCB. Drawing from studies of explanation building among…

This paper is the first part of a multiphase study examining students' mental models about the quantization of physical observables--light, energy, and angular momentum. Thirty-one second-year physics and physics education college students who were taking a modern physics course participated in the study. The qualitative analysis of data revealed…