Elementary teachers face increasing demands to engage children in authentic science process and argument while simultaneously preparing them with knowledge of science facts, vocabulary, and concepts. This reform is particularly challenging due to concerns that elementary teachers lack adequate science background to teach science accurately. This…

With trends across many countries still indicating the decline of student interest in school science and diminishing numbers of students studying science beyond the compulsory years, it seems that the field remains in crisis. To address these unfortunate trends, there needs to be a greater emphasis on science education research that highlights the…

"MyScience" is a primary science education initiative in which being in a community of practice is integral to the learning process. One component of this initiative involves professional scientists interacting with primary school communities which are navigating their way towards sustainable "communities of practice" around the "domain" of…

Our research objective focused on examining the instructional efficiency of tutoring as a form of instructional change as opposed to a non-tutoring approach in an outreach laboratory. We designed our laboratory based on cognitive load (CL) theory. Altogether, 269 twelfth-graders participated in our day-long module "Genetic Fingerprinting." In a…

In this paper, we investigate how elementary school students develop multi-level explanations of population dynamics in a simple predator-prey ecosystem, through scaffolded interactions with a multi-agent-based computational model (MABM). The term "agent" in an MABM indicates individual computational objects or actors (e.g., cars), and these…

Our study investigates the challenges introduced by students' use of lexically ambiguous language in evolutionary explanations. Specifically, we examined students' meaning of five key terms incorporated into their written evolutionary explanations: "pressure", "select", "adapt", "need", and "must". We utilized a new technological tool known as the…

Despite years of research, there remains serious concern regarding the engagement of students in science, mathematics and technology education. In this paper, the authors explore how narrative pedagogies are used in science, mathematics and technology in order to make the subjects meaningful. The paper focuses specifically on the role and…

This study investigated prospective elementary teachers' understandings of the nature of science and explored associations with their guided-inquiry science learning environment. Over 500 female students completed the Nature of Scientific Knowledge Survey (NSKS), although only four scales were analyzed-Creative, Testable, Amoral, and Unified. The…

Despite science learning in settings such as science museums being recognized as important and given increasing attention in science education circles, the investigation of parents' and their children's metacognition in such settings is still in its infancy. This is despite an individual's metacognition being acknowledged as an important influence…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether Socioscientific Issues (SSI) based learning environments affect university students' epistemological understanding of scientific inquiry differently from traditional science educational contexts. We identify and compare conceptions of scientific inquiry of students participating in an…

In order to bridge the existing gap between biology curricula and students' interests in biology, a strategy for identifying students' interest based on their questions and integrating them into the curriculum was developed. To characterize the level of generalizability of students' science interests over 600 high school students from Portugal,…

The demanding first years of teaching are a time when many teachers leave the teaching profession or discard the reform-minded practice emphasized in teacher preparation. If we are to lessen teacher attrition and more effectively support teachers during their development, a better understanding of what occurs during their induction into the…

Teaching science to secondary students in an online environment is a growing international trend. Despite this trend, reports of empirical studies of this phenomenon are noticeably missing. With a survey concerning the nature of laboratory activities, this study describes the perspective of 35-secondary teachers from 15-different U.S. states who…

This study explored two groups of Grade 11 (age 16-17) students' conceptual understandings about aspects of particle theory before, immediately after, and 3 months after instruction with multiple representations (IMR) and instruction with verbal representations (IVR). Data sources included open-ended questionnaires, interviews, and student…

Pupil talk and discussion are seen as having important social and cognitive outcomes. In science classes, pupils' collaborative talk supports the construction of meaning and helps examine the status of evidence, theory and knowledge. However, pupil interactive talk in groups is rare in science lessons. The research reported is part of a project to…