Understanding experimental design (e.g. control of variable strategy or CVS) is foundational for scientific reasoning. Previous research has demonstrated that demonstrations with cognitive conflict (e.g. asking students to evaluate and explain different experimental designs) are effective in promoting children's scientific reasoning, however, the…

The extinguishment of the candle flame in the well-known candle-and-cylinder experiment has been erroneously viewed as caused by the complete consumption of oxygen, for many reasons. To address this misconception scientifically, a series of experiments are carried out to illustrate the phenomenon from a new point of view. Limewater…

Practical work is a distinctive feature of school science and has close associations with scientific experiment and scientific methods as well. In this study, the nature of practical work was examined in the view of the diversity of scientific methods. Based on an analytical framework derived from Brandon's matrix consisting of four categories of…

Cosmic expansion is an important concept in astronomy. For ease of understanding, astronomers generally draw an analogy between cosmic expansion and the expansion of a spherical surface in 3D space. This study theoretically and experimentally investigates the laws governing the motion of particles on the surface of a balloon during expansion.…

Despite the inherent potential of cooperative learning, there has been very little research into its effectiveness in middle school laboratory classes. This study focuses on an empirical comparison between cooperative learning and individual learning in the school science laboratory, evaluating the quality of learning and the students' attitudes.…

The Teacher as Partner is an approach to inquiry-based science teaching, where the teacher works as the students' partner. Prior research suggests that it offers an opportunity to model inquiry actions and voice their often tacit rationale. It also enables learners to witness the difficulties and fallibility that even experts can experience, which…

Engineering design is a complex process both for students to participate in and for instructors to assess. Informed designers use the key strategy of conducting experiments as they test ideas to inform next steps. Conversely, beginning designers experiment less, often with confounding variables. These behaviours are not easy to assess in…

Two investigations were conducted in this study. In the first experiment, the effects of two types of interactivity with a computer simulation were compared: experimentation versus observation interactivity. Experimentation interactivity allows students to use simulations to conduct virtual experiments, whereas observation interactivity allows…

Three experiments examined the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. In Experiment 1, homophone and spelling control errors were embedded in a story context and participants performed a proofreading task as they read for meaning. For both good and poor readers, more homophone errors went undetected than spelling…

Background: The absence of Physical Education (PE) from the South African school curriculum before its reintroduction in recent years contributed to health concerns regarding the low physical activity (PA) levels of children and adolescents in South Africa. Purpose: This study evaluated the effects of a once-a-week enhanced quality PE programme on…

An experiment involving 90 students in the 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades investigated how visual examples and grade (our surrogate for age) affected variability in a drawing task. The task involved using circles as the main element in a set of drawings. There were two examples: One was simple and single (a smiley face inside a circle); the other,…

For over a century, genetic arguments for the existence of racial inequality have been used to oppose policies that promote social equality. And, over that same time period, American biology textbooks have repeatedly discussed genetic differences between races. This experiment tests whether racial terminology in the biology curriculum causes…

A medium-scale quantitative study (n = 90) found that 10-11-year-old pupils dealt with theory and evidence in notably different ways, depending on how the same science practical task was delivered. Under the auspices of a 2×2 part-randomised and part-quasi experimental design, pupils were asked to complete a brief, apparently simple task involving…

This article presents an Exponential Growth Learning Trajectory (EGLT), a trajectory identifying and characterizing middle grade students' initial and developing understanding of exponential growth as a result of an instructional emphasis on covariation. The EGLT explicates students' thinking and learning over time in relation to a set of tasks…

In the present study, we examine the effects of prompts and recasts on the acquisition of two new and different grammar structures in a task-based learning environment. Sixty-four 14-year-old 9th grade students (low intermediate) learning German as a foreign language were randomly assigned to three conditions: two experimental groups (one…