Bilingual education could solve many challenges introduced by an increasingly internationalised education system. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), in particular, may equip students with the necessary cultural and communicative skills to succeed in today's academic environment. However, it is not yet clear how CLIL can be employed…

Science is part of the educational curricula, and its teaching is the responsibility of teachers. Since 2000, scholars from The Organisation for Economic Co-operation (OECD) countries have been tested in science by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), despite the diversity in national higher education systems. This requires a…

While the United States (U.S.) and Canada share features in their secondary education systems (e.g. proportion of immigrants), these nations have differences (e.g. linguistic ). Given the primacy of Canada over the U.S. vis-à-vis science literacy [as measured by the Programme International for Student Assessment (PISA)], underlying differences in…

The systems thinking approach requires understanding and interpreting complex systems. This review investigated how the systems thinking approach in science education is positioned in peer-reviewed empirical research articles and to identify the trends used in the current literature. A systematic review of open-access, empirical peer-reviewed…

Recently, the chemistry education community has focused considerable effort on incorporating systems thinking into chemistry education as a means to address global challenges such as sustainability. In this project, a series of exploratory workshops was held with secondary educators (N = 12) and tertiary educators and researchers (N = 16),…

The importance of motivation-related factors in shaping students' academic achievement across a range of areas, including science, has been consistently acknowledged by the existing research literature. In an effort to improve students' science achievement, many education systems put particular emphasis on the enhancement of intrinsic (i.e.…

This study explores the intersection of gender, sociocultural background, and argumentative socioscientific writing. It focuses on Jewish Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) men and women who were educated in gender-segregated schools separated from the public education (PE) system in Israel. We compared argumentative essays written by these two groups to…

Inquiry-based science instruction is widely advocated, but studies based on international large-scale assessments often show inquiry to be negatively associated with achievement. We re-examine this issue by examining whether the association between inquiry and learning depends upon the provision of teacher guidance. Participants were 151,721…

Systems thinking is the ability to reason about biological systems in terms of their characteristics and can assist students in developing a coherent understanding of biology. Literature reports about several recommendations regarding teaching systems thinking, while it seems that systems thinking has not reached classroom practice. The main aim…

Developing students' ability to think about systems, as opposed to isolated facts, is of central importance in much of science teaching. Prior work in this area has focused on students' recognition of the processes occurring within a system. Comparatively, little work has been done on how students organise the objects that are contained within the…

An increasingly important aim in education is to develop students capable of addressing complex, interdependent problems. This study integrates theories of situated learning, authentic science research, socioscientific issues, and interdisciplinary STEM education to construct a program for high school students. Drawn from Vygotsky and Dewey's…

Science and environmental educators implicitly presuppose that the ecosystem per se is clearly defined and consider learners' misunderstandings to be incorrect scientific interpretations of uncontested knowledge content. The present study, however, explores how in-service secondary education Greek biology teachers address the topic of 'ecosystem…

The present study explores how in-service secondary education Greek biology teachers understand aspects of the concept of ecosystem under the assumption that the ecosystem is an ill-defined concept. If it is to be considered a holistic entity, the ecosystem acquires its definitional features within the ecological field of systems ecology, which…

Explaining phenomena associated with a system involves describing a system's structure and articulating the process through which the system's structure changes over time. This paper defines geo-sequential reasoning in the context of plate tectonics and uses it to analyse how students explain the geological processes that occur along convergent…

The so-called leaking STEM pipeline (dropout in STEM education) has been the subject of many studies. The large interest of scholars in plausible causes of this leakage has resulted in a number of meta-reviews describing factors at system, school and student level related to interest and persistence in STEM education. The STEM pipeline discussion…