There is an increasingly rich body of developmental research on children's understanding of science and religion as ways of knowing. In this manuscript, I put this scholarship in conversation with applied research on science education and consider the potential implications for exposing children to instruction that addresses the relationship…

My charge in this study is to explore the lived experience of a high school teacher while immersed in a problem solving situation in a classroom setting. The main gist of this investigation is to textualize and, thereof, capture the essence of a teacher's encounter of failing to solve a mathematics problem during one of the classroom sessions. To…

Disciplines are by their very "origin and nature" unstable--always already differed and deferred from themselves--due to their genetic relation to what Jacques Derrida calls "différance". In a sense, "différance" is what makes disciplines possible in the first place, and it can be thought of as the economy or mode of…

Learning assistants (LAs) are peer educators who work alongside faculty to facilitate active learning activities and help students develop conceptual understanding. LAs and LA training programs are becoming increasingly prevalent in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) gateway courses in the United States, and research…

This study examines how joint exploration is established and maintained among students and the teacher in secondary mathematics classrooms. We use the theoretical perspective of positioning to conceptualize joint exploration as involving the negotiation and coordination among participants to position students with epistemic agency and authority.…

Much of the philosophical debate regarding technological epistemic enhancement concerns interventions on cognitive capacities that are already performing well in order that they perform even better. However, several decades of research in cognitive science demonstrates that humans harbor systematic cognitive biases that can produce ill-grounded,…

The conceptualisation of knowledge as justified true belief has been shown to be, at the very least, an incomplete account. One challenge to the justified true belief model arises from the proposition of situations in which a person possesses a belief that is both justified and true which some philosophers intuit should not be classified as…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate pre-service teachers' epistemologies of scientific models and their model formation in a model-based inquiry environment. Theoretical underpinnings of this paper are the following: Pre-service teachers' epistemologies of models are structured as their beliefs, can be reshaped by instructional experiences,…

For some years now, the scientific community has been studying how videogames foster acquisition of mental representations of the world around us. Research to date suggests that the efficiency of videogames as learning tools largely depends on the instructional design in which they are included. This article provides empirical evidence related to…

In recent decades, the shift towards the "learnification" of educational discourse has "de facto" reframed educational purposes and schooling practice, thus reframing what students should know, strive for, and, in a sense, be. In this paper, given the efforts to disrupt the dominance of learning discourse, I seek to engage…

After situating the figuration of the postdevelopmental child in the context of hegemonic colonising developmental discourses about child rearing and education, I engage with posthumanist perspectives that rupture the binaries, power relations and age discrimination these discourses assume. Developmentalism raises concerns about how child as…

This research works within the framework of constructivist learning (based on constructivist epistemology) and examines learning as an activity of construction, and it posits that knowledge acquisition (and learning) are transformative through self-involvement in some subject matter. Thus it leads, through this constructivism to a pedagogical…

Anthropomorphisms are widespread at all levels of the educational system even among science experts. This has led to a shift in how anthropomorphisms are viewed in science education, from a discussion of whether they should be allowed or avoided towards an interest in their role in supporting students' understanding of science. In this study we…

Building on Carey and Smith's work on epistemology of science, this study characterized elementary students' scientific epistemology from the role-of-idea and theory-building perspective. The participants included 102 elementary students in Hong Kong. Open-ended questions and coding schemes were developed to examine and characterize their…

Imprecise constructs abound in science education research in part due to reliance on stipulative definitions that neglect fine distinctions between closely related constructs and overlook important meanings and hidden values embedded in language. Lack of conceptual clarity threatens construct validity, hampers theory development, and prevents…