Meta-modeling knowledge is an established construct in science education, typically conceptualized in frameworks encompassing hierarchically ordered levels of understanding specific for different aspects (e.g., purpose of ...

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. ...

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 ...

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; ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Scientific inquiry plays a major role in science education. So far competency structures related to knowledge gain through inquiry have been identified and analyzed. Different levels of such structures have also been ...

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 ...