This study examined the incorporation of generative strategies for the guided discovery of physics principles in a simulation. Participants who either paraphrased or predicted and self-explained guided discovery assignments exhibited improved performance on an achievement test as compared to a control group. Calibration accuracy (the…

Recent research efforts have argued for the "persistence" of some of students' frequent scientific misconceptions, even after correct answers are produced. Some of these studies, based on the analysis of reaction times, have recorded latencies for counter-intuitive or incongruent stimuli compared to intuitive or congruent ones. The…

In histories of twentieth-century Darwinism few developments loom larger than the turn-of-the-century rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's genetic research and the later application of Mendelian principles in constructing so-called Neo-Darwinism. Virtually unknown is the equally enthusiastic embrace of Mendel by antievolutionists, who as early as…

Microfluidics involves the study of the behavior of fluids at microscale, fluid manipulations, and the design of the devices that can effectively perform such manipulations. We are developing two new elective courses to include microfluidics in our curriculum at CSULB. Herein, we present the results of the first course, Microfabrication and…

Wind musical instruments are affected in their intonation by temperature. We show how to account for these effects in a simple experiment, and provide results in languages accessible to both physics and music professionals.

In this paper the author discusses how 21st century education researchers could and in his opinion, should approach the scientific description of the various entities that they might encounter. The word "entities" in pedagogical context refers to phenomena and structures such as "an education system", "education",…

A.V. Usova (1921-2014) has always been one of the leading figures in Russian physics education. Her theory of physics concept formation was formulated during the 1970s and the 1980s and directly influenced the process of physics education in the 20th and the 21st century. Over the years there have been a lot of theories of concept formation. Her…

This study investigated the development of Bhutanese students' views of the nature of science (NOS) as they engaged in an explicit and reflective approach. Seven aspects of NOS were integrated into the chemistry content in two learning units titled "matter and its composition" and "study of gas laws" over a time span of 6 weeks…

Understanding how scientific conclusions are drawn from data is central to learning about the nature of science. Many students struggle with aspects of reasoning from data, including identifying relationships among variables, interpreting graphs, coordinating theory and evidence, and not allowing personal beliefs to outweigh the data when forming…

Elementary teachers often hold inaccurate beliefs about the Nature of Science (NoS) and have negative attitudes toward science and mathematics. Using a pre-post design, the current study examined beliefs about the NoS, attitudes toward science and mathematics, and beliefs about the teaching of mathematics and science in a large sample study…

Introducing Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (NST) topics into school science curricula is considered useful for an in-depth understanding of the content, processes and nature of science and technology, and also for negotiating the social aspects of science. This study examines (a) the development of an inquiry-based Teaching-Learning Sequence (TLS)…

An integrative introduction to the sciences and an introduction to scientific writing can provide a strong foundation for broadly trained STEM majors to explore the interconnectedness of STEM disciplines and prepare them for scientific research. These goals have been accomplished through a sequence of two first-year courses, STEM 101: Integrative…

Many years ago I saw a picture of a huge set of wheels that was used to remove tree stumps during the construction of the Erie Canal (1817-1825) and was intrigued by its use of leverage, mechanical advantage, and torque. Figure 1 is a scale model of the device based on my memory of the (lost) picture and published accounts.

A goldfish isn't always visible inside its fishbowl. If the fish gets sufficiently close to the bowl glass, it will disappear for certain angles of observation. In a recent paper in this journal, Zhu and Shi explained the effect in terms of total internal reflection. We show in what follows that the phenomenon involves some richer optics: a…

In this paper I inspect a "semantic" view of scientific models taken from contemporary philosophy of science-I draw upon the so-called "semanticist family", which frontally challenges the received, syntactic conception of scientific theories. I argue that a semantic view may be of use both for science education in the…