Texts and instructional pictures are widely used for facilitating students' understanding of complex content, especially in science subjects. International large-scale assessments repeatedly reveal differences in students' science achievement between countries. Since text-picture material (TPM) plays an essential role in science education, it is…

Physics lab courses permanently undergo transformations, in recent times especially to adapt to the emergence of new digital technologies and the COVID-19 pandemic in which digital technologies facilitated distance learning. Since these transformations often occur within individual institutions, it is useful to get an overview of these…

Many science educators have argued in favour of including socioscientific issues (SSI) in general, and ethical issues in particular, in school science. However, there have been a number of objections to this proposal, and it is widely acknowledged that such teaching places additional demands on science teachers. This study examined the curricula,…

There has been a growing awareness that graphing is an essential part of the science curriculum. While much research has focused on student conceptions and abilities regarding graphical representations, only few studies have investigated what teachers think about them and how they use graphs in science class. The purpose of this study is to…

Using living organisms in biology education is a common practice that provides students with direct contact with living beings in the classroom. Several benefits and barriers of using organisms in classrooms have been proposed in the literature. Hence, biology teachers should carefully consider the pros and cons of using living organisms, and…

Research in Organic Chemistry education has revealed students' challenges in mechanistic reasoning. When solving mechanistic tasks, students tend to focus on explicit surface features, apply fragmented conceptual knowledge, rely on rote-memorization and, hence, often struggle to build well-grounded causal explanations. When taking a resource…

Chemish - the scientific language of chemistry - is crucial for learning chemistry. To help students acquire the competencies to understand and use Chemish, chemistry teachers need to have a sound knowledge of teaching and learning Chemish: Pedagogical Scientific Language Knowledge (PSLK). But still, despite the importance of this knowledge, the…

As we talked with school teachers about the use of physical computing systems in class, one major drawback of these systems became obvious: almost nobody--next to enthusiastic autodidacts--has been able to tell us on an abstract basis for which educational purposes a certain physical computing system can be used, i.e. in a goal-oriented way. This…

General Studies (Sachunterricht) lesson, which includes social and science themes because of its interdisciplinary form, takes place in the curriculum of each class level at primary schools in Germany. The aim of this descriptive case study is to examine how the teaching process of third-grade General Studies lesson is run in terms of learning…

The use of ICT in science education offers many opportunities to promote students' learning and experimenting comprehensively. Considering that, it is important not simply to replace traditional media, but to explicitly identify the added value of ICT tools for students and teachers. Especially alternative forms of documenting experiments,…

Prior studies in the Computer Science education literature have illustrated that novices make many mistakes in composing SQL queries. Query formulation proves to be difficult for students. Only recently, some headway was made towards understanding why SQL leads to so many mistakes, by uncovering student misconceptions. In this article, we shed new…

Recent research and reform efforts in science education have consistently stressed the importance of coherent science instruction, in which learning opportunities are connected and contextualized by meaningful phenomena, focus on a small set of core ideas over time, and generate a need-to-know about new ideas through a set of connected lessons.…

Most chemistry students struggle with interpreting and understanding NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectra and the general concepts of NMR spectroscopy. NMR spectroscopy seems to be difficult to both teach and learn. Therefore, the corresponding courses should be investigated in more detail. We conducted a survey with N = 39 German university…

Political discourse and policy reforms worldwide have highlighted the importance of promoting the knowledge economy by stimulating academics' societal engagement (ASE). Such narratives partly aim at influencing academics' attitudes and behaviors. Earlier work that has investigated such influence has tended to overlook the development in humanities…

Current developments such as globalisation, migration and the movement of refugees have led to an enhanced cultural diversity of learners globally. Consequently, teachers in schools are faced with the growing demand to integrate interculturality into their teaching practices. Fifteen biology teachers in Germany were interviewed regarding the…