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…

This exploratory study in a classroom setting investigates first graders' (age 7-8 years, N = 25) ability to perform analogical reasoning and create their own analogies for two irreversible natural phenomena: mixing and heat transfer. We found that the children who contributed actively to a full-class discussion were consistently successful at…

Understanding what children know is paramount to planning effective science instruction; however, in any classroom, the students hold a variety of ideas. Representing these differences in ways that also acknowledge the common trends among students might facilitate the process of differentiation. To exemplify one such possible process of…

We focused on young, low-income, African American children in first- to third-grade classrooms where they experienced varied forms of interactive, participatory, and dialogic pedagogy in the context of yearlong, integrated science-literacy instruction. Using conversations that started around children's own science journals, which were an important…

In this paper, we examined data collected as part of a 5-year project designed to foster reform-based urban science teaching through teachers' communities of inquiry. Drawing upon a distributed leadership framework, we analyzed teacher "talk" during professional learning community (PLC) meetings. This analysis yielded five elements: teacher…

This study was part of a multi-year project on the development of elementary students' modeling approaches to understanding the life sciences. Twenty-three first grade students conducted a series of coordinated observations and investigations on decomposition, a topic that is rarely addressed in the early grades. The instruction included…

It is common practice in elementary science classrooms to have students create representations, such as drawings, as a way of exploring new content. While numerous studies suggest the benefits of representation in science, the majority focus on specific, canonical representations, such as graphs. Few offer insight or guidance regarding how…

The purpose of the study was to measure the effects of higher level, inquiry-based science curricula on students at primary level in Title I schools. Approximately 3,300 K-3 students from six schools were assigned to experimental or control classes (N = 115 total) on a random basis according to class. Experimental students were exposed to…

Science education reform has long focused on assessing student inquiry, and there has been progress in developing tools specifically with respect to experimentation and argumentation. We suggest the need for attention to another aspect of inquiry, namely "mechanistic reasoning." Scientific inquiry focuses largely on understanding causal…

We focus on the concept of matter and explore how young children in urban schools bridge their spontaneous concepts and everyday experiences with scientific concepts introduced to them by children's literature information books and their teacher. The study shows how material artifacts used in a sorting activity became ideational tools--semiotic…

This paper describes a comprehensive set of studies designed to assess the potential for commercial reading programs to teach reading in science. Specific questions focus on the proportion of selections in the programs that contain science and the amount of science that is in those selections, on the genres in which the science is portrayed, on…

Researchers from multiple perspectives have shown that young students can engage in the scientific reasoning involved in science experimentation. However, there is little research on how well these young students learn in inquiry-based learning environments that focus on using scientific experimentation strategies to learn new scientific…

The nature of science aspects (NOS) are the most emphasized theme in many curriculum and reform attempts. Teachers as a curriculum implementer in the classroom play important role for policy, arrangements and classroom experiences on NOS understandings of students. Researchers generally assessed the teachers' NOS conceptions using open-ended…

In this paper, we synthesize two bodies of work related to students' representational activities: the notions of meta-representational competence and representation as a form of practice. We report on video analyses of kindergarten and first-grade students as they create representations of pollination in a science classroom, as well as summarize…

Background: Today, for most of us, technology is a vital and inevitable part of our lives. Due to its widespread use, a great emphasis is being given to educating generations about technology. And, every individual has his/her own style of organizing and collecting information. Purpose: The purpose of the present study is to identify the…