In science education, there is a now established focus on fostering students' meaning making through/as multimodal representations as part of their induction into the epistemic practices of the discipline. Increasingly, this agenda is aligned with an emphasis on nurturing students' creative reasoning, as researchers move to enrich theories of…

The premise of our study is that emotional competence (EC) serves as a foundational contributor to the achievement of science education goals in the context of socioscientific issues (SSIs). EC is a set of abilities necessary to accomplish adaptive goals in emotionally arousing situations. We contend that the development of EC is conducive to…

Students' science identity has been identified as an important construct that positively influences their learning engagement, persistence, and career intentions in science. This paper reported the process of developing and validating an instrument that can be used to assess high school students' science identity. The development of this…

Though we have advocated explicit argumentation instruction in science classes for decades, daily instructions are still found insufficient in improving students' argumentation competence. It is therefore important to explore effective instructional strategies through classroom research. This paper compares instructional strategies for classroom…

Students' attitudes towards science is a long-standing topic in science education. Among various sub-constructs of attitudes towards science, students' motives for learning science and their self-efficacy in science learning may be the most frequently studied. Drawing from the expectancy-value theory (EVT), this study explored the extent to which…

Self-diagnosis activities require students to self-diagnose their solutions to problems they solved on their own by detecting and explaining their errors. Worked examples, a step-by-step demonstration of how to solve a problem, are often used to support students in self-diagnosis activities. However, studies indicate that students often fail to…

This study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of using Radioactivity Remote Laboratory Activities (RRLAs) in enhancing Form Four (equivalent to Grade 10) students' understanding of radioactivity and motivation to learn science. For this purpose, in this study, a repeated measures one-way ANOVA design was utilized in which 54 Form Four…

This study investigated the effect of the metacognitive instruction in which students' epistemic cognitions were explicitly addressed, on tenth-grade students' conceptual understandings regarding force and motion. The participants of the study included 107 (49 female, 58 male) tenth-grade students at two public high schools. A quasi-experimental…

This paper analyses students' conceptual sense-making of two representations of protein synthesis: animations and static visualizations. Even though several studies have focused on the effect of animations versus static visualizations or support aspects that enable students to effectively benefit from animations, existing research has not yet…

Students in upper secondary education encounter difficulties in applying mathematics in physics. To improve our understanding of these difficulties, we examined symbol sense behavior of six grade 10 physics students solving algebraic physic problems. Our data confirmed that students did indeed struggle to apply algebra to physics, mainly because…

Educational reforms in Qatar have seen the implementation of inquiry-based learning and other student-centred pedagogies. However, there have been few efforts to investigate how these adopted western pedagogies are aligned with the high context culture of Qatar. The study presented in this article highlights the implementation of a student-centred…

Researchers have consistently demonstrated that studying multiple examples is more effective than studying one example because comparing multiple examples can promote schema construction and facilitate discernment of critical aspects. Teachers, however, are usually absent from those self-led text-based studies. In this experimental study, a…

This paper examines students' engagement in monitoring anomalous results across a 2-year longitudinal study with 9th and 10th graders (14-15 and 15-16 years of age). The context is a set of five inquiry-based laboratory tasks, requiring students to plan and carry out investigations. The study seeks to examine students' interpretation of data, in…

The study investigates differentiated teaching practices of practical work in distinct social contexts and with different experienced teachers, at the level of the Portuguese high school science education. Four teaching practices were analysed in terms of the level of complexity of both scientific knowledge and cognitive skills and in terms of…

Information literacy--i.e. obtaining, evaluating and using information--is a key element of scientific literacy. However, students are frequently equipped with poor information literacy skills--even at university level--as information literacy is often not explicitly taught in schools. Little is known about students' information skills in science…