This study examines how middle school students develop an increasingly coherent understanding of aquatic ecosystems. As part of a broader design research study that used Structure-Behavior-Function (SBF) theory as an organizing conceptual representation, we created two instructional units that focused on pond and aquarium environments. We coded…

Overcoming the challenge of using the steam tables can be considered a rite of passage in undergraduate thermodynamics courses. Students often circumvent the use of steam tables and resort to simpler digital alternatives to retrieve properties. In fact, the steam tables and their digital relatives that supply numeric property values fail to…

We report our progress on the "River Memorial Museum" didactic intervention project developed with schools, in the basin of the Atoyac River in Mexico, that are significantly impacted by the pollution produced through industrialisation. The teachers of the elementary schools in these communities, environmental scientists, educators, and…

The goal of this research is to investigate the act of design in discharge concept using Pendidikan Matematika Realistik Indonesia (PMRI) approach with Lapindo's Mud phenomenon as a context. Design research was chosen as the method used in this research that consists of three phases, namely preparing for the experiment, teaching experiment, and…

Science education should foster students' epistemological view on models and modelling consistent with formal epistemology in science and technology practices. This paper reports the application of a curriculum unit in the classroom using an authentic chemical practice, "Modelling drinking water treatment", as the context for learning.…

What are the benefits of engaging undergraduate students with authentic, inquiry-based curricula that develop transdisciplinary research skills? Internationally, many educators believe that research-active curricula help students better understand how scientific and technological concepts underlie the complexities of our world, especially in the…

This paper reports on a case study investigating students' participation and learning presence in an educational blog implemented as a cross-thematic inquiry activity exploring and debating on the acid rain problem. Twenty-one secondary education students (14-15 years aged), coming from two separate classes, were involved. The content and…

A great variety and amount of teaching materials and methods related to water quality and other Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concerns have been developed. Program developers/trainers responsible for instructional programs will find in ERIC and the Instructional Resources Information System (IRIS) enough material to organize dozens of…

Drawing on game-design principles and an underlying situated theoretical perspective, we developed and researched a 3D game-based curriculum designed to teach water quality concepts. We compared undergraduate student dyads assigned randomly to four different instructional design conditions where the content had increasingly level of…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…