Teachers need an understanding of the nature of science (NOS) to enable them to incorporate NOS into their teaching of science. The current study examines the usefulness of a strategy for challenging or changing teachers' understandings of NOS. The teachers who participated in this study were 10 initial teacher education chemistry students and six…

This explanatory qualitative study investigated the perspectives of participant's and practitioner's perceived barriers to success and the necessary navigational expertise for overcoming the identified barriers. This multiple-case study research design examined three WIA out-of-school youth workforce development programs in Southern Nevada, with…

This research applied the learning strategies to predict in an effect longitudinal growth of cognitive structure of students in biology. The aim of the research is to assess the effect of activating learning strategies on cognitive structures regarding biology. The research was conducted by using control group design. The sample of research was…

Inspired by Gerald Wood and Elizabeth Lemley's (2015) article entitled "Mapping the Cultural Boundaries in Schools and Communities: Redefining Spaces Through Organizing," this response inquires further into cultural mapping as a social practice. From our perspective, cultural mapping has potential to contribute to place making, as well…

Developing students' critical-thinking skills has recently received attention at all levels of education. This article proposes the use of concept-mapping tools to improve students' critical-thinking skills. The article introduces a Web-based concept-mapping tool--Popplet--and demonstrates its application for teaching critical-thinking skills in…

As an alternative approach to web preproduction, I propose the use of concept maps for invention of website projects in business and professional writing courses. This mapping device approximates our students' initial site plans since rough ideas are formed based on a substantial exploratory technique. Incorporated in various disciplines, the…

The basic premise underlying this research is that scientific phenomena are best learned by creating an external representation that complies with the complex and dynamic nature of such phenomena. Effective representations are assumed to incorporate three key characteristics: they are graphical, dynamic, and provide a pre-specified outline of the…

We propose relational data modeling as a tool for replacing the ad hoc and uncoordinated approaches commonly used throughout the social sciences to gather, store, and disseminate data. We demonstrate relational data modeling using global electoral and political institutional data. We define a relational data model as a map of concepts, their…

This article explores how the use of concept mapping, with and without technology support, assists students in learning complex concepts to which they may have had limited previous exposure. Students were engaged in a group-based concept mapping activity, wherein they created two concept maps over the course of several weeks in a large lecture…

Many higher education (HE) system reforms in the past decades have been built on the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM). However, these reforms have not allowed HE to fully take its value for society into account. In recent years a growing call can be heard to orient the HE sector towards more collaboration, a focus on a larger set of…

What happens when teachers perceive a growing rift between their pedagogical practice and their students' lived experiences? How do teachers respond to the uncertainty that such a "relevance gap" can create? In a climate in which literacy research is often pressed to address the achievement gap and to contribute to a sense of certainty,…

This study investigated how studying a refutational map, a type of argument map, affected conceptual change. Refutational maps visually display both correct and alternative conceptions. Participants (N = 120) were randomly assigned to (1) a refutational map condition, (2) a refutational text condition, and (3) a non-refutational text condition.…

This article emerges from the experience of incorporating doctoral students into our Contextual Education (CXE) Program at Emmanuel College (Toronto). This change, I argue, helped us to distinguish more clearly among and thus distinctly orient the different kinds of relationships and theological practices that make up our program towards the…

In an effort to improve student conceptual understanding and help students better connect pre-existing knowledge to new ideas, a concept map assignment was implemented in a first-year college level general chemistry course. This implementation included a quasi-experiment that was carried out in discussion group recitation sections within a…

The purpose of this study was to design and develop a theory-based summary writing online tool, named Summary Writing-Pal (SW-PAL), to assist English as a second language students in improving their summary writing. It also evaluates the effectiveness of SW-PAL in enhancing the students' summary writing performance and examines their perceptions…