Using the iterative process of action research, we identify six portals of understanding, called threshold concepts, which can be used as curricular guideposts to disrupt the socially constituted separation, and hierarchy, between humans and the more-than-human. The threshold concepts identified in this study provide focal points for a curriculum…

This article reports an experimental study on the effects of explicit teaching on 11th grade students' ability to reason causally in history. Underpinned by the model of domain learning, explicit teaching is conceptualized as multidimensional, focusing on strategies and second-order concepts to generate and verbalize causal explanations and…

Identifying students' misconceptions and learning difficulties and finding effective ways of addressing them has been one of the major concerns in chemistry education. However, the chemistry education community has paid little attention to determining discipline-specific aspects of chemistry that can lead to learning difficulties and…

Science education has long seen an emphasis on supporting students' epistemological understandings of how scientific knowledge is constructed and evaluated with the expectation that these understandings will support the students' own construction and evaluation of scientific knowledge. However, research has shown that this connection does not…

Representational logic cannot account for the entanglements of all that matters in making new media: feeling bodies, vibrant matter, feeling bodies and vibrant matter all moving and at different rates. In the currently shifting communicative landscape, where mobile technologies are the primary means for youths' digital production, all this…

Does expertise within a domain of knowledge predict accurate self-assessment of the ability to explain topics in that domain? We find that expertise increases confidence in the ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena. However, this confidence is unwarranted; after actually offering full explanations, people are surprised by the limitations…

We argue that learning science requires children to move from perceptually based representations to more abstract conceptual representations and to understand that appearance may sometimes deceive us and that the same phenomenon in the world can have more than one representation when seen from different perspectives. We also argue that the…

Teachers' beliefs shape their daily instruction and the materials presented to students. The personal views of educators are especially relevant when socioscientific issues are involved. Preservice and novice teachers' mastery of the nature of science (NOS) and personal beliefs in and out of the classroom influence their worldviews and classroom…

This paper starts by exploring the relevance of Bernstein's work on vertical and horizontal discourses and the constitution of professional knowledge for conceptualisation of the knowledge needed for teaching practice. Building on arguments for the differentiated nature of knowledge, and drawing on the work of Winch, Young and Muller on expertise,…

This study investigated secondary school students' engagement in epistemic and narrative practices of chemistry in the context of a chemistry story on gas behavior. Argumentation is an example of an epistemic practice in science and stories are one kind of narrative (Ricoeur, 1981). By using a chemistry story, the authors hoped to engage students…

Interest in understanding mathematics teaching and learning phenomena, and to develop new and effective methodologies to teach Differential Calculus and Linear Algebra led me to look for ways to dialogue between APOS Theory and other mathematics education theories. This enterprise has facilitated a better understanding of them. Bridges between…

Recent studies of the transition from school to university mathematics have identified a number of epistemological gaps, including the need to change from an emphasis on equality to that of inequality. Another crucial epistemological change during this transition involves the movement from the pointwise and global perspectives of functions usually…

This study investigated the effect of multiple text-graphic interventions to facilitate conceptual change on the topic of human induced climate change. Given the superiority of refutation texts over standard expository texts, the goal of the present study was to determine if this effect could be enhanced, thereby creating an even more powerful…

Plausibility judgments rarely have been addressed empirically in conceptual change research. Recent research, however, suggests that these judgments may be pivotal to conceptual change about certain topics where a gap exists between what scientists and laypersons find plausible. Based on a philosophical and empirical foundation, this article…

Connectivism, which has been argued to be a new learning theory, has emerged in the field of online learning during the last decade. On the World Wide Web at least, connectivism promises to establish learning spaces similar to those that Ivan Illich imagined in "Deschooling Society", through so-called massive online open courses (MOOCs).…