Thermal cameras have shown to have utility in secondary school classrooms and undergraduate courses. In this paper, the author argues for their potential in the primary school classroom and presents a range of activities that can be undertaken with thermal cameras (or supplied images). With limited access in mind, the activities in this paper have…

Physical and virtual labs have unique capabilities that can influence how students learn from them. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of physical and virtual manipulatives on students' learning of heat and temperature and to examine the influence of various combinations of physical and virtual manipulatives. A total of 205…

Temperature and heat are difficult concepts for children to grasp due to their abstractness. An image-to-writing approach, guided by the visualisation practices of scientists, was designed to engage elementary students with constructing images to represent their ideas about phenomena and translating these images into text using scientific…

Science is one of the most important subjects for students at all educational levels. To promote engagement, hands-on experiments can provide a 'realistic and exciting experience of the content' (Holstermann, Grube and Bögeholz, 2010: 744) and hopefully facilitate motivation. In this article, George Stylos and Konstantinos T. Kotsis present four…

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the Context-Based Approach (CBA) enriched by Prediction-Observation-Explanation (POE) on 5th grade students' conceptual understanding of the States of Matter, Heat and Temperature. In this study, quantitative and qualitative data collection methods were employed. The quantitative…

When the thermal expansion of water is discussed in school or university lessons, functional relationships are often inferred without considering measurement uncertainties. Moreover, in some learning materials, the goal of experimentation and the experimental setup do not match. This creates the wrong picture of scientific practice. In this…

The spread of COVID-19 has caused a high demand for online learning or self-learning at home. We focus on evaluating which media is most suitable for self-learning for the third graders. For effective assessment of children's learning, the study adopted AEIOU: Awareness; Enjoyment; Interest; Opinion formation; and Understanding as the evaluation…