We developed a lesson where students construct a qualitative representation to learn how clock genes are regulated. Qualitative representations provide a non-numerical description of system behavior, focusing on causal relation-ships and system states. They align with human reasoning about system dy-namics …

Background Practical work provides the unique opportunity for students to make a clear connection between their hands-on activities and the underlying minds-on concepts, but research indicates that these possibilities are used relatively little or unsuccessfully. Purpose In this study, lesson design …

Using socio-scientific issues as a learning context is an effective approach to achieve an important goal in science education, which is to enhance scientific literacy. It involves strengthening skills such as argumentation while also improving an understanding of the Nature of Science and imparting …

Background A major challenge for effective practical work in school science is to encourage students to connect hands-on aspects to minds-on principles, in other words to Think Back-and-Forth (TBF). Teacher behaviour is pivotal in achieving this goal, but teachers lack guidelines how to accomplish this. …

Understanding the behaviour of parallel circuits is challenging for many students. In this paper, we present a lesson designed to support students in learning about parallel circuits by constructing a qualitative representation. Qualitative representations are non-numerical models that focus on causal …

Peer assisted study sessions (PASS), also known as Supplemental instruction, are structured peer guided sessions linked to a specific course, led by experienced and trained students called PASS-leaders. These PASS-leaders undergo several days of training before running their first session and receive …

In this workshop we present three lesson activities to teach core (astro)physics concepts at pre-university level which students find difficult to grasp with traditional interventions: star properties, star states and the fusion-gravity balance. In each activity, students construct and simulate a conceptual …

Building on the Minds-On project, this study developed the online module “Celestial Bodies” to enhance hands-on and minds-on learning, providing students with individualised feedback prompts to monitor and identify weaknesses in their understanding. The lesson centred on classifying 14 celestial bodies …

Liz is a CLIL and language teacher educator, senior lecturer, author, and researcher. Her publications include CLIL Skills, CLIL Activities, a doctoral thesis on the role of English teachers in bilingual streams and articles on multilingualism. She also chairs audit panels for bilingual streams in vocational …

Philosophy is an elective subject in secondary education in the Netherlands, which is not often studied in the context of citizenship education. This is probably because only a minority of students participate in philosophy classes in the upper grades of secondary education (approximately 2-5% of all …