The purpose of this study was to determine the learning levels, mistakes, and misconceptions of the 8th grade students on the subject of “angles in geometry” as well as the possible reasons for these situations. Research sample consisted of 30 students attending the 8th grade of a middle school located in the central district of a northern province of Turkey during the 2012 – 2013 academic year. 4 open-ended questions were used in this study. Firstly, the answers given were divided into two: correct and incorrect. Then, incorrect answers were split into sub-categories and tabulated. According to the results of the study, (1) students paid attention to the physical appearances of geometric figures alone without taking into consideration their geometric properties; (2) although they detected some geometric properties of figures, they failed to associate these properties with other knowledge required for solution; (3) they generalized a property that was valid for only a specific condition over different situations; (4) and they did not fully comprehend the concept of parallelism on the subject of angles.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and General Pedagogical Knowledge (GPK) are fundamental types of knowledge for a teacher that he or she must use in order to plan, teach in the classroom, and assess students’ learning outcomes. This paper investigates experienced primary school teachers’ PCK and GPK while teaching science in Finland and in Thailand. Teachers’ interview data were analysed by using deductive and inductive content analysis. The analysis units were analysed according to the categories and sub-categories of PCK and GPK. In addition, the frequencies of all PCK and GPK sub-categories were counted and presented by country. The analysis revealed that the Finnish teachers had flexibility in their teaching: they did not have specific techniques with which to handle students; the techniques used depend on the situations occurring at the moment. There were no strict rules for student discipline in the class. They emphasised the teaching of concepts through textbook and computer materials. In Thailand, the teachers emphasised the teaching and learning of procedural knowledge and consequently used experimentation, along with authentic materials in the lab. There were student discipline problems in the classroom; therefore, rules were set up to cope with those problems.

This article builds on a semiotic perspective of science learning that is framed in terms of achieving competency in a disciplinary discourse of a science such as physics. The aim of the article is to use this perspective, and the proposal that learning in a science discipline should be seen in terms of achieving fluency in a critical constellation of modes of representation, to explore how the affordance attributes of these representations work together to generate a collective disciplinary affordance. The idea of a collective disciplinary affordance is then used to argue for the importance of appresentation in science education. Recommendations are made for incorporating the discussion into teacher craft-knowledge.

Edutainment has recently been a major growing area of education, showing great promise to motivate students with relevant activities. The authors are among innovators who have developed cutting-edge fusions of popular culture and STEM concepts to engage and to motivate middle school students, using vehicles such as music/song and skateboarding. The importance of using relevant and practical methods of instruction and curriculum delivery that build on student interests and increase enjoyment in the learning process are critical at the middle school level, especially in the STEM fields. The use of edutainment in this manner is meant to inspire broader interest in mathematics and science for middle school students and to develop a culture of education that makes learning more accessible to all students. This paper surveys and illustrates the use of such immersive modalities to involve middle school students actively with concepts and suggests further directions for the use of demonstrations and videos in educational settings.

One of the main components of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge refers to their use of representation forms. In a similar vein, organizing concepts logically and meaningfully is an essential element of teachers’ subject matter knowledge. Since subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge of teachers are tightly connected as categories forming their knowledge base, it is reasonable to expect that representation forms and organization of knowledge are related. In order to find out how far these two facets depend on each other, two Finnish upper secondary physics teachers’ answers to an electronic questionnaire were analysed as case studies. Questions varied from teachers’ organization of knowledge to their representation forms regarding the topics of “magnetic flux density” and “Ampère’s law.” A concept map constructed by one teacher, led us to an improved description of teachers’ knowledge organization. In addition, observed and analysed lessons given by the second teacher shed light on representation forms. Organization of knowledge of the studied topics was investigated by means of recognizing the core concepts, and then interrelations between the other concepts. So, the study could advise physics teacher to more systematically plan and organize their teaching of the studied topics. Other findings illuminate useful representation forms that physics teachers apply during their teaching such as suiting experiments, explanations, and models. Thus, our conceptualization emphasize for teachers to reflect on effective ways to organize their knowledge and, consequently, to select adequate representation forms.