Background: There are two major types of pictures that have been the focus of multimedia learning research, namely, seductive and interpretational pictures. Despite an increasing body of literature documenting the effects of either seductive or interpretational pictures added to text-based materials, there is a paucity of research explicitly…

Currently, the physics disciplines are represented by a significantly larger number of professional males, compared to females. Although the problem of underrepresentation of female physicists has several causes, one likely reason is the lower interest that female school students have in physics activities. Several instructional solutions have…

The pendulum has a great relevance in physics and it has been explored in educational papers from many theoretical or experimental points of view (see, for example, Refs. 1-12 and references therein). Here a method for the measurement of the gravitational acceleration with a large number of trials is presented; we assume that the systematic errors…

Access to knowledge has never been easier in the internet age, and so it is important that students develop skills to discriminate undependable information from reliably investigated research. We have created an exercise that teaches good research practice by exploring the history, ethics, and design of clinical trials. Students apply their…

This research is part of the integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the Moroccan education system, our objective being to evaluate the use of computer-assisted experimentation (CAEx) in learning to encourage the authorities of the Ministry of National Education, Vocational Training and Sports to adopt the CAEx program…

What follows is a description of the procedure for and results of a simple experiment on the formation of impact craters designed for the laboratory portions of lower mathematical-level general education science courses such as conceptual physics or descriptive astronomy. The experiment provides necessary experience with data collection and…

The aim of this research was to investigate the effect of science course which is based on inquiry based learning approach on seventh grade students' scientific process skill levels. Both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods were used in the study. Considering that both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods were…

This article presents a part of the Inter-Tetra project. This study firstly reviews the literature on conceptions of experiments in didactics of math and didactics of physics to design questionnaires to survey the conceptions of experiments in teaching physics and teaching math in Vietnam. Thereafter, the survey has been conducted among the math…

This study describes a program that the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) carried out in partnership with Birmingham City Schools (BCS) to test an educational intervention, i.e., Hands-On Physics (HOP), among 8th grade students in predominantly minority schools. It also evaluated teachers' demographics and educational backgrounds. The…

It is commonly recognised that practical work has a distinctive and central role in science teaching and learning. Although a large number of studies have addressed the definitions, typologies, and purposes of practical work, few have consulted practicing science teachers. This study explored science teachers' perceptions of experimentation for…

Recently, I was tasked with the creation and execution of a new themed general education physics class called The Physics of Warfare. In the past, I had used the theme of a class, such as the physics of sports medicine, as a way to create homework and in-class activities, generate discussions, and provide an application to demonstrate that physics…

Experimentation is a complex problem-solving process. In biology lessons, experiments involve creative thinking and open discovery; however, they still require some degree of instructional guidance. The right balance between discovery learning and instructional guidance depends substantially on students' prior knowledge. Students with low prior…

How do secondary school science teachers justify the model of a particulate nature of matter, and how do the arguments they use relate to historical arguments? To find out, we individually interviewed 11 in-service secondary school science teachers (certified to teach chemistry and/or physics in secondary school, and with 2 to 30 years of teaching…

Although the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) has been challenged on methodological, theoretical, and ethical grounds, these criticisms have been largely ignored by teachers and textbook authors. Recent revelations arising from an analysis of the SPE archival materials, however, not only strongly support these past criticisms but also question the…

In this paper, we report on an experimental activity for discussing the concepts of speed, instantaneous speed and acceleration, generally introduced in first year university courses of calculus or physics. Rather than developing the ideas of calculus and using them to explain these basic concepts for the study of motion, we led 82 first year…