Concept maps have been adopted extensively in teaching and assessment. Assessment schemes, including the closeness index and the N-G method, have also been widely applied to evaluate the quality of students’ concept maps. Teachers must make great efforts to evaluate students’ concept maps, because present concept map assessment schemes do not reveal ways to help them improve such maps. Addition...

In the present study, the author investigated the role of thinking styles in university students' preferences for teaching styles and their conceptions of effective teachers. Students (121 men and 134 women) from the University of Hong Kong responded to 3 self-report tests: the Thinking Styles Inventory-Revised (R. J. Sternberg, R. K. Wagner, & L-F. Zhang, 2003), the Preferred Thinking Styles i...

www.JCE.DivCHED.org • Vol. 83 No. 5 May 2006 • Journal of Chemical Education 811 Research in science education in the last thirty years has shown that students enter chemistry classes with many preconceived ideas about the behavior of the natural world (1). These ideas, derived from previous physical and social experiences, often lead them to make predictions and build explanations different fr...

This paper examines computing academics’ conceptions of the Unix operating system, and the purpose of teaching Unix. Interview transcripts from nine academics were analysed phenomenographically. A small number of qualitatively different conceptions of Unix were identified, within two broad categories. The first broad category manifested a technical approach to Unix. Within this broad category, ...

HIGHLIGHTSThis interview study explores beliefs about the instructional role of illustrationsWe compared illustrators', teachers', students' and common people's ideasParticipants' responses were internally coherent and close to multimedia learning theoryWe propose and discuss an integrated multimedia learning model An interview study, based on specific pictures taken from textbooks used in prim...

Beginning elementary teachers face numerous challenges in engaging in effective science teaching, and the expectations for elementary science teaching are becoming even more demanding. Since teachers' beliefs mediate their practice, characterizing their beliefs about effective science teaching can yield insights about ways to support beginning elementary teachers as they learn to teach science....

There is general consensus regarding the urgent and pressing need to develop school students' computational thinking abilities, and to help school teachers develop computational thinking pedagogies. One possible reason that teachers (and students) may struggle with computational thinking processes is because they have poorly developed mental models of how computers work, i.e., they have inadequ...