This case study of classroom practice examined what preservice teachers learned about young children's metacognitive thinking processes and constructivist pedagogy through a classroom project. Thirty preservice teachers engaged in a semester-long metacognitive project in which they conducted four sessions with a group of young children. The…

Student-generated drawings are known to be effective in building and revealing students' conceptions of chemistry. Some chemistry concepts, moreover, include changes and processes that cannot be merely represented by static drawings. Computer-based animations are needed to represent the dynamics. In this study, 25 chemistry student teachers, who…

We studied the initial conceptions of 73 pre-service primary teachers regarding the concept of ecosystem and examined how their understanding evolved as a result of participation in an inquiry-based learning exercise. The inquiry process involved identifying students' initial conceptions, making them aware of these, comparison of their ideas with…

Students' ability to explain phenomena were compared when they were provided a model versus asked to draw their own model. As part of a pilot test, 1,405 students in the fourth through twelfth grades from across the United States responded to one of three different modeling tasks. Each task presented students with a phenomenon related to energy…

When a student explains a biological phenomenon, does the answer reflect only the "product of retrieving knowledge" or does it also reflect a "dynamic process of constructing knowledge?" To gain insight into students' dynamic knowledge, we leveraged three analytic frameworks--structures--behaviors--functions (SBF), mental…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…