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…

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…

Field trips can provide unique opportunities for authentic, meaningful, and self-determined learning. Capitalizing on these opportunities requires that field trips be structured. A common way to do this is through the use of educational materials such as worksheets. The extent to which the guide's or teacher's autonomy-supportive or…

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…

Scientific argumentation is increasingly seen as a key inquiry practice for students in science classrooms. This is a complex practice that entails three overlapping, instructional goals: Participants "articulate their understandings" and work to "persuade others of those understandings" in order to "make sense of the phenomenon under study" (L.…

We use a construct-based assessment approach to measure learning progression of energy concepts across physical, life, and earth science contexts in middle school grades. We model the knowledge integration construct in six levels in terms of the numbers of ideas and links used in student-generated explanations. For this study, we selected 10 items…

The concept of science as argument, and the view that engaging in scientific argumentation should play a key role in science education, has become widely endorsed. The case is made here that this objective will be enhanced by broad understanding of the nature of argument skills and their directions and patterns of development. A line of research…

Being able to make claims about what students know and can do in science involves gathering systematic evidence of students' knowledge and abilities. This paper describes an assessment system designed to elicit information from students at many placements along developmental trajectories and demonstrates how this system was used to gather…

Identity formation is a critical dimension of how and why students engage in science to varying degrees. In this paper, we use the lens of identity formation, and in particular identities in practice, to make sense of how and why Melanie, over the course of sixth grade, transformed from a marginalized member of the science class with a failing…

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…

Translating written curricular materials into rich, complex, learning environments is an undertheorized area in science education. This study examines two critical cases of teachers enacting a technology-rich curriculum focused on the development of complex reasoning around biodiversity for fifth graders. Two elements emerged that significantly…

In this study, students' views on the nature of science (NOS) were investigated with the use of a large-scale survey. An empirically derived multiple-choice format questionnaire was administered to 1702 Korean 6th, 8th, and 10th graders. The questionnaire consisted of five items that respectively examined students' views on five constructs…