The purpose of this dissertation is to study students' competencies in generating scientific explanations within the domain of complex systems, an interdisciplinary area in which students tend to have difficulties. While considering students' developing explanations of how complex systems work, I investigate the role of prior knowledge…

This article presents a theoretical model of the process by which students construct and elaborate explanations of scientific phenomena using visual representations. The model describes progress in the underlying conceptual processes in students' explanations as a reorganization of fine-grained knowledge elements based on the Knowledge in Pieces…

In epistemologies of both scientific and common sense thinking "objectification" characterizes the formation of knowledge and concepts, yet in each case its meaning is different. In the former, objectification in acquiring knowledge refers to the individual's rationalistic reification of an object or of another person and to disengagement or…

In this article we ask how concepts that organize work in two professional disciplines change during moments of consultation, which represent concerted efforts by participants to work differently now and in the future. Our analysis compares structures of talk, the adequacy of representations of practice, and epistemic and moral stances deployed…

The article aims to illuminate the character of Web 2.0 based on a reading of Martin Heidegger in order to provoke new epistemological questions about Web 2.0 and knowledge formation. The article applies the ontological grounds on which Heidegger described being-in-world and worldliness to the phenomenon of Web 2.0. The article states that Web 2.0…

The purposes of this study were to determine high school students' epistemological beliefs in the domain of physics and to explore and explain the possible relationship between their beliefs and their conceptual change in physics by taking the students' learning strategies into account. A multi-case study design was used for the research…

Continuity of functions appears throughout the grades in South African high school (FET (further education and training)) topics as prescribed by the final draft of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement. This article reports on the use of a combined framework of APOS (action-process-object-schema) and DCT (dual coding theories) to analyze…

This study explores the spontaneous explanatory models children construct, critique, and revise in the context of tasks in which children need to predict, observe, and explain phenomena involving magnetism. It further investigates what conceptual resources students use, and in what ways they use them, to construct explanatory models, and the…

This article is concerned with "commonsense science knowledge", the informally gained knowledge of the natural world that students possess prior to formal instruction in a scientific discipline. Although commonsense science has been the focus of substantial study for more than two decades, there are still profound disagreements about its nature…

The study reported was part of a large thinking skills intervention for 11-12-year-old children. This paper focuses on the impact of a thinking skills intervention on children's understandings of intelligence. A total of 178 children (n = 86 girls and n= 92 boys) across six schools participated in the study. Children were individually pre-tested…

This article presents the Quebec ministry of education's (MELS) strategy for diversifying the national historical narrative that is transmitted in the province's History and Citizenship Education program as well as the manner in which Francophone national history teachers put this strategy into practice. In bringing research on their social…

This study had the goal of investigating the association among elementary students' (N = 276) science and math beliefs and the relationship between those beliefs and teachers' ratings of mathematical and science understanding. Results of structural path analysis indicate that in science, intellectual risk-taking (IRT; the willingness to share…

Naturalistic thinking and knowing, the tacit, experiential, and intuitive reasoning of everyday interaction, have long been regarded as inferior to formal reason and labeled primitive, fallible, subjective, superstitious, and in some cases ineffable. But, naturalistic thinking is more rational and definable than it appears. It is also relevant to…

One of the forms of first musical conduct is the exploration of sound sources. When young children produce sounds with any object, these sounds may surprise them and so they make the sounds again--not exactly the same, but introducing some variation. A process of repetition with slight changes is set in motion which can be analysed, as did Piaget,…

This paper outlines a theoretical paradigm for distinguishing thinking, knowing and believing. A new taxonomy is presented for categorizing levels of knowing and outlines a structure of justification for each level. The paper discusses and explains the importance of such distinctions in decision making and thinking in general.