In this study, a STEM activity was designed in which 9th-grade students can complete the task of making incubators by overcoming the difficulties they face in the engineering design process. This activity has been handled in the context of energy conversion and prepared based on the engineering design process consisting of 9 stages. The activity…

As digital technologies proliferate throughout classrooms in the United States, iPads and other mobile tablets have been heralded as tools for enhanced peer collaboration. However, little research has examined exactly how students interact with and around iPads during collaborative learning tasks. This study employs multimodal interaction analysis…

This paper presents the impact of student generated representations on students in three secondary schools in Nepal. Qualitative data were obtained from semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and a classroom observation. Students, teachers and school principals were the research participants of this study. The findings indicated that…

This paper investigates unplugged computing as a formal pedagogical strategy to teaching computing to a Maltese secondary class of Year 9 students. It aims at identifying the effectiveness of this pedagogy outlining the strengths and weaknesses in its application, taking into consideration the level of attainment for students, as well as the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of prelistening activities, particularly interactive brainstorming advance organizers that used a "Think-Pair-Share" structure, on the listening comprehension performance of L2 junior high school students. The term advance organizer is defined as a teaching activity that helps build or…

The aim of the studies reported in this paper is to gain classroom based empirical evidence on the learning effectiveness of learning objects used in two types of study settings: Collaborative and individual. A total of 127 seventh and ninth grade students participated in the experiments. They were assigned into one of the study modes and worked…

This article describes a writing partnership that involved university preservice teachers and ninth grade students enrolled in an integrated social studies/language arts class. While the high school students found the experience exciting and satisfying, the preservice teachers expressed anxieties and concerns as they endeavored to foster academic…

This study explores the characteristics of after-school program activities at a charter school in the Southeast US highlighting students' experiences with and gains from these after-school program activities. A qualitative case study design was employed to understand students' views and opinions regarding the activities and their learning…

Acquisition of conceptual knowledge is a central aim in science education. In this study we monitored an interdisciplinary hypermedia assisted learning unit on hibernation and thermodynamics based on cooperative learning. We used concept mapping for the assessment, applying a pre-test/post-test design. In our study, 106 9th graders cooperated by…

The study investigated the effects of structured and unstructured cooperating groups on students' behaviors, discourse and learning in junior high school. One hundred and sixty-four grade 9 students participated in the study. The students were videotaped as they worked in three to four person, mixed-gender and ability groups on a science-based…

In this study, a learning unit on microorganisms for ninth-grade students was developed based on the Science-Technology-Environment-Society (STES) approach. The learning unit contained 15 learning tasks, which were performed in individual and cooperative learning settings, using a variety of teaching/learning methods with an emphasis on the…

A prominent theme permeating national science education reform reports such as the "National Science Education Standards" (National Research Council [NRC], 1996) and "Project 2061: Science for All Americans" (Rutherford & Alhgren, 1990) recommends the incorporation of cooperative learning in the science classroom. Although…