We report on research that explores students' literacy practices in six Norwegian primary school science classrooms during integrated science-literacy instruction. The study combines observational video data and interview data to examine students' encounters with and use of text, along with their views and experiences related to science…

In efforts to understand and promote long-term interest in science, much work has focused on measuring students' interest in topics of science, typically with surveys. This approach has challenges, as interest in a topic may not necessarily indicate interest in scientific practices and pursuits. An underexplored and perhaps productive way to…

Lack of time for teaching science in traditional classroom placements in the United States has led some science teacher educators to provide practice teaching time for elementary education students in informal science settings. The purposes of this study were to describe the culture of one science methods course taught in conjunction with a K-7…

Science education has a central role to play in preparing a scientifically literate citizenry that is capable of understanding complex environmental challenges facing human societies and making well-informed and evidence-based decisions that help resolve these challenges. However, evidence suggests that most Americans are poorly equipped with the…

The Next Generation Science Standards call for the adoption of many aspects of scientific inquiry in the classroom. The ways in which classroom talk and classroom environment change as students and teachers learn to utilize inquiry approaches are underexplored. This study examines the frequency with which linguistic markers related to access and…

Understanding the features of science learning experiences that organize and motivate children at early ages can help educators and researchers find ways to ignite interest to support future passion and learning in the sciences at a time when children's motivation is declining. Using a sample of 252 fifth-and sixth-grade students, we…

This study invited small groups to make several arguments by analogy about simple machines. Groups were first provided training on analogical (structure) mapping and were then invited to use analogical mapping as a scaffold to make arguments. In making these arguments, groups were asked to consider three simple machines: two machines that they had…

Elementary science standards emphasize that students should develop conceptual understanding of the characteristics and life cycles of plants (National Research Council, 2012), yet few studies have focused on early learners' reasoning about seed structure and function. The purpose of this study is twofold: to (a) examine third-grade…

In this paper, the author considers the organisation and the recontextualization of "Rika" (School Science) in the second half of the nineteenth century in Japan. In considering developments, the author set up analyses points based on curriculum politics and concluded that the organisation and the recontextualization of "Rika"…

The present paper advocates the use of History of Science into the teaching of science in primary education through a case study in the field of electricity. In this study, which provides both historical and experimental evidence, a number of conceptual difficulties faced by early nineteenth century physicists are shown to be a useful tool to…

A great amount of research has been carried out world-wide to promote history of science as a powerful science teaching tool. Because the ways of choosing and using historical elements depend on teachers' or researchers' educational purpose, any attempt to support a single model-to-use seems difficult and probably irrelevant. However,…

To improve on the classic school trip to the museum and the traditional distinctions between formal and informal learning, every year we run a project where the schools (first the teachers and then the pupils) are actively involved right from the very first stages of planning. The various projects realised so far involve schools with children of…

This paper describes a classroom experiment where students use techniques found in the history of mathematics to learn about an important mathematical idea. More precisely, sixth graders in a primary school follow Archimedes's method of exhaustion in order to compute the number p. Working in a computer environment, students inscribe and…

The purposes of this study were, based on John Dewey's ideas on experience, to examine how primary students used their own everyday experience and were affected by own and others' experience in science discourse, and to illuminate the implications of experience in science education. To do these, science discourses by a group of six…

This is an editorial report on the outcomes of an international conference sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (REESE-1205273) to the School of Education at Boston University and the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University for a conference titled: "How Can the History and Philosophy of…