Korean students have shown relatively little interest and confidence in learning science, despite being ranked in the top percentile in international evaluations of academic achievement in science such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Although research indicates a positive relationship between student perceptions of…

This study explored third-grade elementary students' conceptions of nature of science (NOS) over the course of an entire school year as they participated in explicit-reflective science instruction. The "Views of" NOS-D (VNOS-D) was administered pre instruction, during mid-school year, and at the end of the school year to track…

Learning astronomy involves significant spatial reasoning, such as learning to describe Earth-based phenomena and understanding space-based explanations for those phenomena as well as using the relevant size and scale information to interpret these frames of reference. This study examines daily celestial motion (DCM) as one case of how children…

This paper describes Ecuadorian in-service teachers and their science teaching practices in public primary schools. We wanted to find out to what extent teachers implement inquiry activities in science teaching, the level of support they provide, and what type of inquiry they implement. Four questionnaires applied to 173 teachers resulted in the…

This study investigated elementary students' explanations for the daily patterns of apparent motion of the Sun, Moon, and stars. Third-grade students were chosen for this study because this age level is at the lower end of when many US standards documents suggest students should learn to use the Earth's rotation to explain daily celestial motion.…

This study explores the spontaneous explanatory models children construct, critique, and revise in the context of tasks in which children need to predict, observe, and explain phenomena involving magnetism. It further investigates what conceptual resources students use, and in what ways they use them, to construct explanatory models, and the…

The study examined US elementary teachers' knowledge and practices in four key domains of science instruction with English language learning (ELL) students. The four domains included: (1) teachers' knowledge of science content, (2) teaching practices to promote scientific understanding, (3) teaching practices to promote scientific inquiry, and (4)…

This paper examines the experiences reported by scientists and graduate students regarding the experiences that first engaged them in science. The interviews analysed for this paper come from Project Crossover, a mixed-methods study of the transition from graduate student to PhD scientist in the fields of chemistry and physics. This analysis…

The US National Science Education Standards and the Benchmarks for Science Literacy recommend that students understand the apparent patterns of motion of the Sun, Moon, and stars by the end of early elementary school, yet no research has specifically examined these concepts from an Earth-based perspective with this age group. This study examines…

The present study takes an interdisciplinary mathematics-physics approach to the acquisition of the concept of angle by children in Grades 3-5. This paper first presents the theoretical framework we developed, then we analyse the concept of angle and the difficulties pupils have with it. Finally, we report three experimental physics-based teaching…

Children's stereotypes about scientists have been postulated to affect student science identity and interest in science. Findings from prior studies using "Draw a Scientist Test" methods suggest that students see scientists as largely white, often unattractive, men; one consequence may be that girls and minority students feel a science career is…

Reading and writing stories with science-related themes make it possible for students to develop interest in and capacity for scientific thinking when specialist science and more popular genres converge. Additionally, feminist scholars have called for greater use of creative writing activities in school science to counter students' disengagement…

This paper presents the analysis of two teaching experiments carried out in the context of the mathematics laboratory in a primary school (grades 3 and 4) with the use of the pascaline Zero + 1, an arithmetical machine. The teaching experiments are analysed by coordinating two theoretical frameworks, i.e. the instrumental approach and the Theory…

The science vocabulary from a science curriculum standards document (Ministry of Education Ontario, 2007) was classified by morphological developmental level and compared to the grade level topics of the curriculum (grades 1 to 8). Descriptive statistical analyses highlight the complex nature of science vocabulary and the incompatibilities between…

"Knowing and doing measurement" is a fundamental competency in real life since measuring attributes of objects in appropriate units and using measuring tools assist students to quantify and understand the world. For this reason, the study of measurement has a special place in every mathematics curriculum. Among the domains of measurement, length…