The research presented in this dissertation looks at how students in general chemistry reason about atomic emission spectroscopy. Situated within the context of a transformed general chemistry curriculum called "Chemistry, Life, the Universe, and Everything" (CLUE), the goal of this study was to (1) characterize the various ways in which…

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…

Several studies indicate that more than half of all college freshmen are not prepared to read and analyze college-level texts. The problem of college reading becomes more formidable when it comes to community college students, who often enter college with socio-linguistic factors that pose challenges to literacy learning. Historically,…

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) is the most recent reform in science education across the United States. The NGSS demands a shift in both teaching and learning. Yet there is no direction on how teachers are to implement this shift in their classrooms. This mixed-methods study examined 12 middle school teachers' perceptions and the…

It requires a unique set of skills to teach science to young children. Not only do future elementary educators need the requisite content knowledge to address the broad base of science topics that fall under the innocuous acronym known as STEM, they also need to be able to effectively respond to their students innately curious natures. And, while…

Throughout development, children undergo moments of abrupt conceptual transitions, often replacing intuitive knowledge with grounded scientific theories. This typically also creates a situation of social conflict, as different children may hold at the same time substantially different theories and explanations about the same phenomenon. The main…

Trillion Theory (TT), a new theory, estimates the cosmic origin at one trillion years. This calculation of thousands of eons is based upon a growth factor where solar systems age-out at a max of 15 billion years, only to recycle into even larger solar systems, inside of ancient galaxies that are as old as 200 billion to 900 billion years. TT is a…

Polysemy has always become a significant issue in interdisciplinary studies, mainly because particular words or phrases tend to have multiple meanings and the way to decide on the intended meanings involves cultural understanding that may be problematic for different groups of people. This paper divides the main research questions into two…

In the current paper, we develop an approach to early science pedagogy that is based on insights about how complex adaptive systems function. Complexity approaches have an important advantage over traditional information-processing approaches: They anticipate the proverbial 'mind with a mind of its own' without having to postulate exclusively…

Literature reviews are an important and popular part of synthesising evidence across a range of disciplines. There are numerous approaches, each with their distinctive features and purposes. The aim of this article is to advance the science of literature reviewing by describing a new form of review: The 'Focused Mapping Review and Synthesis'…

Measurement instruments of physics, especially those dedicated as teaching aids in physics classroom are improving. These measuring instruments are not only used for measurement purposes, but also to apply theoretical concept into the real world, thus making it easier for students to comprehend. Therefore, this study aims to design, construct, and…

In this paper a well-known experiment is considered that is used to demonstrate some aspects of water boiling. It is shown that the currently popular explanation is wrong and a better explanation is proposed, backed up with experimental data. Variations of the experiment are proposed that can be used for a more in-depth examination of the…

A number of terms have been defined and inconsistently used across various texts in enzymology which may attract the attention of undergraduate students and instructors. At some places, inconsistent use results in confusions as well as leads to the misuse of these terms. Although it is difficult to resolve such inconsistencies, attempts have…

The Phantom Bouquet is a venerable lecture demonstration that does a fine job of showing how a concave spherical mirror can form a real, inverted image. In the original demonstration, a brightly illuminated artificial rose is hung by its stem in front of a concave spherical mirror. The distance from the reflecting surface to the rose is somewhat…

The hydrogen spectrum is one of the most commonly demonstrated and most commonly studied. After the visible spectral lines (Balmer series) are explained by the Rydberg's formula, it becomes immediately apparent that there will also be similar infrared and ultraviolet series. As you may have taught your students, these are called the Paschen and…