Plate tectonics is the organizing paradigm of geosciences, but it is also conceptually complex, and students often struggle with developing a system level understanding of the earth. This article reports on research designed to create a characterization of the different levels of sophistication around plate tectonics in the form of a learning…

Helping students understand that the scientific community's claims change through time, sometimes radically, allows them to develop a well-grounded sense of the "nature of science." Learning to reason about how scientific claims come to be accepted, and later refuted, is important for understanding the tentative nature of scientific…

There is a need for research-informed instructional approaches that promote school students' deep conceptual understanding of abstract geological concepts. Given that a type of learner-constructed stop-motion animation, 'slowmation', has been shown to offer affordances for learning in science preservice teacher education, we extended its…

International research into the nature, emergence, and development of geographical misconceptions is substantial. However, Hungarian educational research lags behind in exploring this phenomenon in detail. The present study identified some plate-tectonics-related misconceptions of three distinctive groups of students: ninth-grade secondary school…

We developed a middle school earthquake science and hazards curriculum to promote earthquake awareness to students in the Central Asian country of Tajikistan. These materials include pre- and post-assessment activities, six science activities describing physical processes related to earthquakes, five activities on earthquake hazards and mitigation…

Current high school Earth Science curricula and textbooks organize scientific content into isolated "units" of knowledge. Within this structure, content is taught, but in the absence of the context of fundamental understandings or the process of how the science was actually done to reach the conclusions. These are two key facets of scientific…