This study examines the relationship between students’ general visual-spatial ability and their understanding of electricity and electromagnetism, a topic that requires imagining many invisible, 3-dimensional phenomena. ...

We constructed paper-and-pencil test-items to assess chemistry student teachers’ scientific inquiry competencies. We focused on the inquiry method experiment, divided into three reasoning steps (question & hypothesis; ...

In this paper, we bring together a well-established and often-studied instrument assessing students’ understanding about force and motion, the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), and a proposed description of how students ...

From primary school through university and beyond, textbooks are crucial for teaching and learning science. In most cases the content of the books is aligned with intended state curricula, and teachers in many countries ...

Despite the central role of Scientific Inquiry within science education, this topic is rarely focused upon during science lessons in Germany. A comparison with a school system that emphasises Scientific Inquiry in a ...

The ability to solve complex and real-life problems is one of the key competencies in science education. Different studies analyzed the relationships between complex problem solving (CPS) and covariates such as intelligence, ...

Measurement of cognitive load (CL) is seen as a problematic issue since no consensus about appropriate instruments has been reached. In this study, a rating scale instrument to measure mental load (ML; 6 items) and mental ...

Past research has examined students’ understanding of energy at different stages of schooling. This research has led to the widespread view that students progress in their understanding of energy through a sequence of key ...

The expansion of the universe is one of three pillars of the Big Bang theory and, therefore, an important aspect in cosmology. How the understanding hereof, including the complex concept of an expanding space, is developing, ...

Forced choice-tasks have been developed to assess students’ (N = 901) understanding of models and modeling in biology based on a theoretical structure differentiating five aspects and three levels of understanding (Upmeier ...