Exlploration of student difficulties with prediction strategies and semantics that physicists use when describing images, mirrors, and lenses. Describes the rigorous development a nationally adopted conceptual test in physics education that is used to determine the effectiveness of various instructional techniques for students' conceptions of Newton's three laws of motion. Teachers predict much higher student achievement gains than students can actually achieve. Students' conceptions of gravity are highly dependent on the specifics of their mental model of a spherical Earth. Describes a complete framework vision for a national content, instruction, assessment, program, and teacher professional development in science education.
Students have a wide variety of mental models of Earth as a sphere.
Describes a highly effective and systematic interviewing strategy appropriate for investigating student conceptions. Describes a highly effective and systematic interviewing strategy appropriate for investigating student conceptions finding students have misconceptions about gravity. A long list of student conceptions in earth and space science based on classroom experience of the authors. Students learn sky motions equally as well with a celestial sphere as in an interactive live planetarium teaching classroom. Professional astronomers usually describe the universe as being very large and full of mostly empty space often starting with Earth and moving to larger entities.