To engage meaningfully with scientific models, undergraduate students must come to understand what counts as a scientific model and why. To gain a sense of the characteristics that undergraduate chemistry students ascribe to scientific models, we analyzed survey data that address students' ideas about both model criteria in general and criteria…

Structural reasoning is a combined ability to "look for structures, recognize structures, probe into structures, act upon structures, reason in terms of general structures, and see how a piece of knowledge acquired resolves a perturbation experienced" (Harel and Soto, 2017). The purpose of this study was to explore the cognitive…

The issues surrounding native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) as teachers (NESTs and NNESTs, respectively) in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) are a current topic of interest. In many contexts, the native speaker of English is viewed as the model teacher, thus putting the NEST into a position of…

A well-ordered biological complex can be formed by the random motion of its components, i.e. self-assemble. This is a concept that incorporates issues that may contradict students' everyday experiences and intuitions. In previous studies, we have shown that a tangible model of virus self-assembly, used in a group exercise, helps students to grasp…

This mixed methods study examined how college student participants discussed their approach to making career decisions, with a focus on how their perspective may be consistent with various models of career decision making. Brief telephone interviews were conducted with 20 college students, and the narrative data were analyzed using qualitative…