Background/purpose: It is an urgent necessity to identify geometric conceptual errors among students at different levels. These errors cannot be ignored, as they hinder the learning of related concepts. Teachers need to be aware of these errors, which are often embedded in students' cognitive structures, so that they can work on eliminating them…

Clearly defining and clarifying crosscutting concepts (CCCs) helps students to apply them as thinking tools or lenses to understand disciplinary core ideas and science and engineering practices. This study identified three characteristics of the sub-concepts of CCCs: conceptual, superordinate, and common across disciplines, and explored a way…

The current study examined how prospective first- and second-grade mathematics teachers define the polygon diagonals concept, how they reconstruct their definition during and following an intervention, and how their concept images develop over time. Twenty-three prospective teachers participated in the study, during which they were asked to…

A growing body of empirical studies in the field of early childhood science education suggests play as a dynamic means to engage young children with the natural world and create the conditions for children's learning and development in science. Although our understanding of play in science as an activity deepens, we still do not know much about…

A standard element of the undergraduate ordinary differential equations course is the topic of separable equations. For instructors of those courses, we present here a series of novel modeling scenarios that prove to be a compelling motivation for the utility of differential equations. Furthermore, the growing complexity of the models leads to the…

Engineering designers often generate multiple concepts to increase novelty and diversity among early solution candidates. Many past studies have focused on creating new concepts "from scratch;" however, designers at every level become fixated on their initial designs and struggle to generate different ideas. In line with prior work on…

The purpose of this case study, informed by a Lakatosian perspective, is to identify how an alternative conception that originates in present learning but is related directly to subsequent learning contexts can be constructed. Before the study, one of the authors found by accident that a student who had learned about Avogadro's principle and…

How anthropomorphic reasoning functions in scientific thinking has been a controversial topic. There is evidence it is problematic as well as evidence it can play productive roles, for scientists and for students. In science education, however, the prevailing view remains that it is an impediment. For this study, we have chosen examples of what we…

In their recent article on teachers' proportional reasoning, Copur-Gencturk et al. (2022) draw attention to a type of strategy that they call "relative", lodged right between additive and multiplicative thinking. This strategy raised interest in our research team, as it aligned well and helped give stronger meaning to some strategies…

To be able to form and develop competencies with regard to the nature of science (NOS) for students, the teachers must have appropriate conceptions about NOS. Therefore, this study explored levels of conceptions about the nature of science of future physics teachers who have experienced two different physics teachers-education curricula using the…

Sixty (35 girls and 25 boys) 9th-grade students' conceptual understanding of the number line was qualitatively assessed through verbal explanations and visual representations. The assessment included an open-ended question focused on students' number line descriptions and the explanations coalesced around six features: sequential ordering (i.e.,…

Important theoretical developments in TESOL education challenge the monolingual mindset, instead valuing and leveraging students' complex linguistic repertoires alongside their funds of knowledge and identity through translanguaging practices to foster literacy development. Through a case study of an arts-rich book making experience facilitated by…

Although complex analysis is part of the study programs of many mathematics undergraduates, little research has been done on how individuals interpret basic concepts from complex analysis. To address this gap, this paper investigates how experts individually think about complex path integrals. For this purpose, the commognitive framework is used…

Academic design pedagogy in the early stages of design is crucial and complicated. The complicated stems from the diverse aspect of architectural design. The world of values, opinions, and ideas begins the architectural design process, and junior architecture students strive to express their ideas in the language of architectural forms.…

There has been a major international focus on the education and care of toddlers. To date, empirical studies on adults' interactions in play with toddlers have focussed on the proximity of teachers, teachers' affective responses, and joint attention between adults and children in play. However, less attention has been given to the role of two…