In Anatomy and Physiology courses, students often struggle with visualizing structures, or processes, that occur at the cellular level, such as capillary exchange. Whenever available, models can be vital to students' understanding of a topic, particularly when they can be constructed by students in real time. To demonstrate capillary exchange to…

The project described here was aimed at developing and evaluating a novel curriculum with corresponding instructional materials for middle school students on an introduction to Newtonian mechanics, based on physics education research findings. A case study showed that teachers who attended a half-day workshop on the curriculum subsequently enacted…

Educative curricula support teacher learning as well as the learning of students. High quality educative curricula contain features that help teachers customize learning opportunities and environments in ways that meet the needs of their learners. Designing these features requires expertise related to subject matter content, pedagogy, teacher and…

Combinations of text and different types of pictures are commonplace in biology as in science in general. The single representations (i.e., text, picture) constituting a text-picture combination may contain redundant or complementary information. The ability to identify and integrate information in different kinds of text-picture combinations is…

This study aims to investigate the effects of using diorama on 7th grade students' academic achievement and science learning skills in "human being and environment relation" unit. The participants were 49 (E:25, C:24) 7th grade students studying during 2015-16 academic year in Diyarbakir, Turkey. An achievement test and "science…

Pill bugs, also called roly-polies, are small terrestrial isopods that are abundant in temperate areas throughout the world. Because they are engaging, harmless, and easily collected, they provide an excellent opportunity for children to learn about invertebrate body parts, behaviors, and information processing. This column includes activities…

The purpose of this study is to develop a flow map for history of science instruction on nature of science (NOS) using a cognitive strategy. This is done to enhance overall scientific literacy through specificity and reflectiveness, and to examine pre-service elementary teachers' understanding of the NOS using NOS flow maps concerning Galileo's…

Large investments are made in curriculum materials with the goal of supporting science education reform. However, relatively little evidence is available about what features of curriculum materials really matter to impact student and teacher learning. To address this need, the current study examined curriculum features associated with student and…

The alternative conceptions that students hold put a brake on subsequent meaningful learning, and therefore, the identification of these wrong ideas is crucial for effective teaching and academic success. Undergraduate STEM students often perceive Chemical Thermodynamics as a difficult subject, in which entropy has been pointed out as a threshold…

In this article, we discuss Micro Assignment Guided Inquiry and Collaboration (MAGIC), an active learning method that draws on the merits of inquiry-based learning in STEM courses. We describe the use of Micro Assignments (MAs) consisting of a series of short, instructive guiding questions that scaffold the course material. Students work through…

There has been little consideration in the science education literature of schools or curricula that advocate creationism. Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) is among the world's largest providers of creationist science materials with a curriculum divided into a system of workbooks which students complete at their own speed. This article…

All students today attach a great deal of importance to having access to a technologically-enhanced education. As a result, teachers are pressured to integrate their teaching, material, and technological expertise into their classes. The TPACK framework was utilized to teach science in lower secondary schools as part of this action research. For…

Visual literacy, which is the ability to effectively identify, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media, is an important aspect of science literacy. As molecular processes are not directly observable, researchers and educators rely on visual representations (e.g., drawings) to communicate ideas in biology. How learners…

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) technology influences students' cognitive processes and affective experience, according to previous research findings. Yet, empirical studies that investigate the impact of IVR on science education in secondary schools are limited. This article reports a pilot study that has two objectives: First, to investigate…

Students have difficulties in relating the chemistry phenomena they learned and the life around them. It is necessary to have teaching aids which can help them to relate between chemistry with the phenomena occurred in everyday life, which is chemistry's teaching aids based on local wisdom. There are 3 teaching aids which used in chemistry…