Scientific explanations often make use of things that cannot be seen or felt, such as protons, electrons, and quarks. Do these things really exist? If so, how do is it known that they exist? Imagine being enclosed in a completely dark room with no light at all and not being able to see a thing. Being chained to a chair somewhere in the room, and…

Using mathematical gossip in the classroom allows teachers to expand their students' horizons, and provide pathways to improvement of understanding. The expansion of a simple idea into another mathematical context can enrich a student's learning. In particular it may help to bridge the gap between purely procedural approaches and a conceptual…

The terms "protean career" and "boundaryless career" are metaphors. This paper outlines the nature of metaphor and its use in contemporary social science, particularly in the study of careers. It identifies five characteristics of metaphors, which serve as a guide to analyzing and evaluating them. These are (1) literal and figurative meaning; (2)…

Conformational analysis is one of the first topics in the organic chemistry curriculum that deals with the crucial problem of viewing and drawing organic molecules. A set of comprehensive exercises is devised that facilitates the students understanding of elementary concepts of conformational analysis with the use of a hands-on approach.

Many concepts in developmental psychology are inferred or confirmed from very particular experimental or naturalistic observations but investigators often generalize their validity to a broad domain of situations. This permissiveness is affecting progress. This paper provides examples of this error and criticizes the tendency to award essences to…

A motion tracker measures acceleration and rotation in three dimensions, sufficient for a complete determination of the motion. In this article, a rollercoaster ride is analysed with reference to motion tracker data. The use of this type of data in education is discussed as a way to deepen students' understanding of concepts related to force and…

In a recent study of conceptual combination, Estes (2003) presented evidence for the priming of relational information in the absence of shared constituents between the prime and target (e.g., "pancake spatula" was interpreted more quickly following "bacon tongs" than following "city riots"). He argued that these data support the view that…

We investigated how parents respond to young children's questions about the identity of artifacts. Children's questions were predominantly ambiguous about whether they were inquiring about name or function, but when their questions were more specific, they were almost always about function. For unfamiliar objects, parents responded with functional…

Institutional relations to knowledge objects at the primary school are time-fluctuant and therefore closely linked to the development of institutions. Building up the concept of material implies several sciences and technologies in overlapping epistemological fields. The questions of transposition and appropriation associated to the concept at…

Robert Sternberg's model of giftedness brings together interesting and very important elements of giftedness by synthesizing wisdom, intelligence, and creativity in novel ways. While his model is based on extensive research and utilizes a variety of sources and expertise, the epistemological consistency of Sternberg's model is, in the author's…

An approach to learning chemical facts that starts with the periodic table and depends primarily on recognizing and completing patterns and following a few simple rules is described. This approach exploits the exceptions that arise and uses them as opportunities for further concept development.

This article covers the application of virtual reality (VR) to training and lifelong learning. A number of considerations concerning the design of VR applications are included. The introduction is dedicated to the more general aspects of applying VR to training. From multiple perspectives, we will provide an overview of existing applications with…

A critical task for public school teachers is to build and maintain productive relationships with their students, especially to facilitate learning. That task is particularly important in preparing new teachers for urban schools because cultural differences between the majority of urban teachers and their students can complicate and impair those…

In line with the cognitive theory of multimedia learning by Moreno and Mayer (2007), an interactive, multimodal learning environment was designed for the pretraining of science concepts in the joint area of physics, chemistry, biology, applied mathematics, and computer sciences. In the experimental set up, a pretest was embedded in order to…

This paper reports an examination on gender differences in lunar phases understanding of 123 students (70 females and 53 males). Middle-level students interacted with the Moon through observations, sketching, journalling, two-dimensional and three-dimensional modelling, and classroom discussions. These lunar lessons were adapted from the Realistic…