While technology advancement and scientific innovation have created new topics and fields of inquiry in STEM education, external content experts such as university scientists/researchers have been increasingly involved to enhance K-12 teachers' disciplinary understandings and professional development (PD). However, few studies have scrutinized…

Newton's laws are a ubiquitous topic in introductory physics instruction. One common problem involves asking what will happen if you stick your finger into a cup of water sitting on a scale. A way to solve the problem would be to first recognize that the water exerts a buoyant force upward on the finger, which students can recognize as being the…

In many science and engineering undergraduate programmes, physics courses are fundamental and can be seen as a potential place where students can develop complementary abilities such as the computational thinking process. The present work proposes and describes the learning science and engineering with electronic spreadsheets cycle (LSEESC)…

In practical work focussing on conceptual development, students spend valuable in-class time on collecting data rather than making sense out of it. This provides a barrier to learning about the targeted concept. To address this problem, we developed an approach that we coin "collaborative data collection." Using a practical on the topic…

In interdisciplinary education, students find out that even basic concepts such as time, freedom or control mean different things for different disciplines and individuals. Through such encounters, students develop an ever-richer conceptual toolbox for making sense of the world. But, how do concepts travel (Bal, 2002) in an interdisciplinary…

Biochemistry is a core subject in the cross-disciplinary training on Biotechnology engineering courses. Metabolic pathways teaching has traditionally integrated hands-on laboratory experiences and traditional lectures, which detail a large number of reactions at a molecular level, their enzymes and regulation. The current scenario of COVID-19…

This article presents a task providing college students opportunities to build on their high school knowledge of trigonometry to explore parametric equations and inverse trigonometric relationships within a contextual learning ladder problem.

This study aims to evaluate cognitive conflict in constructing mathematical concepts, based on thinking errors. The data were collected through observations of words or sentences, leading to the derivation of qualitative outputs. Furthermore, the results showed that the two selected subjects experienced cognitive conflicts regarding thinking…

Mark Creager noticed that how we teach students to reason mathematically may be counter-productive to our teaching goals. Sometimes a linear approach, focusing on sub-processes leading to a proof works well. But not always. Students should be made aware that reasoning is not always a straight forward process, but one filled with false starts and…

This study was aimed at eliminating the difficulties in teaching the concepts and the students' conceptual understanding in the "Force and Energy" unit through semantic mapping. The study was conducted using the action research method. This study was conducted in the control group using the existing learning method in the science…

The context surrounding today's college-going youth is different from when their parents pursued higher education in the late 1980s to early 2000s. I sought to understand how these parents, now as adults with children on the doorstep of their own college-going process, form knowledge about 21st century college-going and what sources these parents…

In this paper, we report the results of a 3-year, quasi-experimental study comparing students' engagement and deep learning of course materials between students who took an undergraduate engineering course that used a video game approach to a control group. The video game, EduTorcs, provided challenges in which students devised control algorithms…

We share results from a one-year early algebra classroom intervention. One kindergarten, one first-grade, and one second-grade classroom participated in the intervention and three classrooms of the same grade levels served as control sites. The intervention addressed the structure of even and odd numbers, mathematical equivalence and equations,…

Mastery of mathematics depends on the people's ability to manipulate and abstract values such as negative numbers. Knowledge of arithmetic principles does not necessarily generalize from positive number arithmetic to arithmetic involving negative numbers (Prather & Alibali, 2008, https://doi-org.bibliotheek.ehb.be/10.1080/03640210701864147). In this study, we…

This study aims to examine the effect of conceptual understandings related to anion-cation, acid-base, ionic-covalent, metal-nonmetal, and number of protons-number of electrons concept pairs taught in the periodic table to 8th grade students with the 5E learning model supported by concept maps. The study was conducted among 100 (50 in the…