The study investigated the mental models of primary school children related to the day/night cycle. Semi-structure interviews were conducted with 40 fourth-grade and 40 sixth-grade children. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data indicated that the majority of the children were classified as having geocentric models. The results also…

The study investigated tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-grade students' alternative ideas relating to the motion of a body travelling in the field of gravity with an initial horizontal velocity. The sample of the study consisted of 40 tenth-grade students, and 33 and 40 eleventh-grade students that attended different sections of upper secondary…

In the last column we focused (as a primary goal of instruction) on the importance of teaching so that students learn to think their way into and through content. We stressed the need for well-designed daily structures and tactics for fostering deep learning, offering three strategies as examples. In this column, we provide four additional…

The goal of this study was to examine the two related links of "research to teaching practice" and "teaching practice to research" that pre-service elementary teachers made during an action research project focusing on a conceptual-change teaching experience with elementary school students. Data were collected from the final written reports from…

The challenges and opportunities of globalization require art education scholars and practitioners to develop international competencies, but research in the specific field of comparative art education is very limited at present. In this article, I provide a pragmatic framework for studying art education policy as a subfield of comparative…

The international literature suggests students frequently resort to the use of formulae when solving stoichiometry problems without understanding the concepts. In prior work we identified Thai student alternative conceptions and ability to solve numerical problem for stoichiometry. The results indicate that many Thai students also hold alternative…

Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping…

This study examined students' perceptions about gender and the subject of mathematics, as well as gender and mathematics learning. Secondary school students and pre-service elementary teachers were surveyed using the Mathematics as a Gendered Domain and Who and Mathematics instruments developed by Leder and Forgasz (Leder, 2001). The data indicate…

Hemispheric laterality may be a useful concept in teaching, learning, training, and in understanding more about human development. To address this issue, a measure of hemispheric laterality was compared to musical and mathematical ability. The Human Information Processing Survey (HIPS) instrument, designed to measure hemispheric laterality, was…

Second language learners arrive at every grade level with a variety of experiences and differing academic backgrounds. Responding to their learning needs means accommodating the entire range of students from monolingual English speakers to monolingual speakers of other languages, and a variety of bilingual profiles in between. This article…

Instructors in electrical and computer engineering and in computer science have developed innovative methods to teach digital logic circuits. These methods attempt to increase student learning, satisfaction, and retention. Although there are readily accessible and accepted means for measuring satisfaction and retention, there are no widely…

This study was part of a 6-year integrated project designed to build a databank of students' science conceptions in Taiwan. The main purpose of this study was to identify the characteristics of students' mental models regarding acids/bases, understand their changes in mental models, and explore sources that might influence students in constructing…

This article presents an approach for developing a theory related to university library group work. Next, it reviews generic group-related phenomena indicated by the approach, applying these phenomena to university libraries. Finally, the article surveys this theoretical development, revealing that most of it remains to be accomplished.

Two studies examined how parent explanation changes what children learn from everyday shared scientific thinking. In Study 1, children between ages 3- and 8-years-old explored a novel task solo or with parents. Analyses of children's performance on a subsequent posttest compared three groups: children exploring with parents who spontaneously…

Many students in physics courses fail to achieve a desired conceptual change because they assign an incorrect ontology to the to-be-learned concept. This situation has been detected in previous research for the case of field lines: many college students assign material properties to the lines and describe them, for example, as tubes that contain…