In light of extensive research demonstrating widespread misconceptions about electricity, this paper describes a learning study that targeted the most likely source of difficulty--failure of middle school pupils to develop a mental model that serves as a bridge between static and current electricity. During the intervention, pupils first envision…

Science teachers in many countries were required to shift from face-to-face (F2F) instruction to distance learning (DL) during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the aim of helping science teachers learn how to support their students in negotiating such shifts in the future, we used an online motivation survey based on achievement goal theory to…

Troubleshooting activities require students to diagnose teacher-crafted erroneous examples by detecting and explaining the conceptual errors driving them. In a previous study, the author tested whether diagnosing erroneous examples and then scoring them using a rubric that contained the related worked examples, a step-by-step strategy to solve a…

International comparative assessments of student achievement are constructed to assess country-level differences and change over time. A coherent understanding of the international trends in educational outcomes is strongly needed as suggested by numerous previous studies. Investigating these trends requires long-term analysis, as substantial…

The goal of this research is to provide a rich set of connections between two fields: (i) Nanoscale science and technology (NST) and (ii) topics from a common middle school physics curriculum. NST is emerging as one of the most promising new fields of the 21st century, which is one of the many arguments for including NST topics in secondary…

Different approaches are employed when teaching environmental issues. One approach, termed the "environmental scientific approach," perceives environmental education as part of life or earth sciences, providing factual, scientific knowledge. Another approach, termed the "environmental sustainability citizenry approach",…

Women's underrepresentation in mathematics-related careers continues to concern policymakers, economists, and educators. This study addressed the issue by examining data from two international databases, namely IEA's "Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2015," and the World Economic Forum's "Global Gender Gap…

This article describes a unique ongoing experience of learning programming via engagement in music programming of known melodies. Seventh and eighth graders participated in 10 lessons of weekly activity. Via the programming of melodies, using the Scratch 2.0 environment, they became acquainted with basic concepts of programming such as methods,…

Research indicates that troubleshooting activities that require students to reflect on pre-prepared erroneous examples, i.e. erroneous solutions to problems that correspond to common naïve ideas, impact their learning positively. These include asking students to diagnose erroneous examples; in other words, detect the conceptual errors and then…

This study compared students' learning in troubleshooting and problem solving activities. The troubleshooting activities provided students with solutions to conceptual problems in the form of refutation texts; namely, solutions that portray common misconceptions, refute them, and then present the accepted scientific ideas. They required students…

I examined the impact of a self-diagnosis activity on students' conceptual understanding and achievements in physics. This activity requires students to self-diagnose their solutions to problems that they have solved on their own--namely, to identify and explain their errors--and self-score them--that is, assign scores to their solutions--aided by…

Continuing motivation for science learning may be manifested through engagement in extracurricular science-related activities, which are not the result of school or other external requirements. Very few articles have appeared in the last decade on this important aspect of science learning. This article presents a survey based on seven Likert-type…

This article presents a model for the development of an environmentally oriented unit designed to be implemented as an integral part of the science core curriculum. The program's main goal is encouraging students at the junior high-school level to develop systems-thinking and environmental insight as a basis for environmental literacy. A…

The study in this paper was carried out in the framework of an evidence-based continuous professional development (CPD) programme in which teachers documented evidence about their practice in a portfolio. The context of the CPD was related to the "Learning Skills for Science" (LSS) programme, which advocates the incorporation of…

The aim of the present study is to explore the effects of Meta-strategic Knowledge (MSK) on scientific inquiry learning. MSK is a subcomponent of metacognition defined as general, explicit knowledge about thinking strategies. Following earlier studies that showed considerable effects of explicit instruction of MSK regarding the strategy of…