In 'The role of play', the fifth article we are highlighting from the extensive "FORUM" archive available online, Maggie Gracie draws on material and observations she had collected during a year of study in an infant and reception class in the mid-1970s to develop ideas about the need to enable pupils to develop genuine autonomy of…

Past researches show that personality trait is a strong predictor for one's academic performance. Today, mature and verified marker systems for assessing personality traits already exist. However, marker systems-based assessing methods have their own limitations. For example, dishonest responses cannot be avoided. In this research, the goal is to…

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is not only an integral part of computing degrees but also a requirement in non-computing majors such as engineering. Understanding OOP concepts can be difficult for novice programmers, and often leads to the development of misconceptions. This is exacerbated when the discipline requires students to learn a…

This paper aims to contribute to the growing field of research on teaching practices in higher education, with a focus on the prevalent yet unresearched practice of concept introduction in lectures. This small-scale case-study provides data which lend themselves to a comparative analysis, with a view to describing and accounting for the dispersion…

Difficulties presented by students on the concept of instantaneous velocity are well known. This is in part due to instantaneous speed being often defined in terms of the notion of mathematical limit, which may not be clear to many students in introductory physics courses. In this work we present a complementary teaching proposal that can help…

Angle measurement is a significant topic in almost all areas of mathematics learning and also in many disciplines outside mathematics education, such as engineering and architecture. According to the literature, there are three common conceptions of angles--as union of rays, rotations, and wedges. Researchers argued that students must consider…

A virtual Game-Based Tournament of Chemistry was developed as an alternative to the traditional problem-solving classes to aid students in reviewing and understanding organic acidity and basicity concepts. The tournament was based on a multilingual virtual board game (English, Portuguese, French, and Italian) which aimed to facilitate students'…

Fostering students' bidirectional conception of the equal sign (viewing the equal sign as indicating an equivalence of two sides rather than a 'show result' symbol) is challenging, and students' misconception of the equal sign is persistent. Some studies mention that in China, the pedagogical approach to introducing the equal sign supports…

Concept mapping remains widely used in education. However, little is known about how self-constructed concept maps and peer feedback can improve student learning outcomes in chemistry. We investigated the effects of peer feedback on concept mapping and how it improves students' learning performance in a large second-semester, introductory…

External representations such as diagrams often appear in teachers' repertoire of pedagogical tools to support students' conceptual learning and problem-solving activities. The study of diagrams and diagrammatic representations has received growing interest from diverse disciplines. Diagrams remain a central feature of science, technology,…

Generative AI may significantly disrupt the teaching and practice of business communication. This study of 343 communication instructors revealed a collective view that AI-assisted writing will be widely adopted in the workplace and will require significant changes to instruction. Key perceived challenges include less critical thinking and…

The current study examined self-organized learning environments (SOLEs) pedagogy as a conduit to learners' metacognitive skills and conceptual understanding in physical sciences and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as a whole in Capricorn District of Limpopo Province of South Africa. The aim was based on ongoing debates…

The most obvious feature of expertise in chemistry is content knowledge, which defines the primary objectives of instruction. Research in chemistry education, and STEM education more broadly, has also devoted attention to students' developing scientific practices of reasoning, investigation, and learning. In this study, we set out to investigate…

In group activities, students work collaboratively to accomplish specific objectives. Students have to engage and interact with each other in order to complete collaborative assignments. One way that students stay engaged is through asking questions. In the research reported here, we looked at peer-to-peer questions in the context of a…

Explaining natural phenomena by determining causal relationships is conducive to understanding scientific concepts. In science education, numerous studies examine students' causal reasoning. Given the importance of core ideas for students' understanding of how and why a phenomenon occurs, the study focused on the relationship between students'…